Has anyone put their slide in on a truck bed trailer? I'm going on a trip that will have several day trips within the camping trip and trying to figure out how to make it happen. The trailer I'm looking at has trailer brakes, but I'd add load range E tires and airbags... or should I scrap the whole idea?

 

I haven't done it myself, but I've seen pictures online of truck campers mounted on trailers, so apparently there are people who do it. Do a Google image search on "truck campers on trailer" and you'll find plenty of pictures of them.

 

You talking about a bumper pull pickup bed trailer? Lots of options on a gooseneck flatbed of course, but pickup bed trailer would be somewhat challenging. My thoughts - your tongue weight would see wild swings because of the higher center of gravity and huge wind cross section. A truck camper balances its entire weight real close to the rear truck axle. Mine adds almost no weight to the front axle (front axle 5660 empty, 6220 loaded). Every time you stop, that high COG will give you very large tongue weight. At highway speed, the wind will pull the camper and you'll probably have negative tongue weight trying to pull the hitch off the ball. My second concern would be sway, again because of the high COG. Loaded on a truck, both the front and rear sway bars help to offset sway, as well as the intertia from the rest of the truck. On a bumper pull, you would only have one sway bar, and very little resistance to rolling motion.
If you're going to try it, I'd stick with a light weight slide in, maybe a pop-up, and try it with empty tanks first.
Also, it's not too bad to pull a slide in off the truck as long as you have a flat-ish spot to do so. Once you do it a couple times it takes less than about 15 mins start to finish. I've done that a couple times when we were at a stop for a few days in a row, which makes those day trips much easier.

 

Why not just drop the TC and use the truck?

 

We drop, scoot and go all the time...with the common and modern remote electric jacks it's much, much nicer and simpler than the old hydraulic or hand crank jacks. It is the only way for us to go as we often have a boat or horse trailer behind us. We can get to where we are going and have the trailers disconnected and parked and the camper off in 30 minutes or less. 45 min to an hour if we are launching and mooring the boat on top of that or running picket lines for the horses.








Lights don't get hooked up unless we are going to be someplace for more than a couple of days. Canopies and tents don't go up unless we are going to be someplace for a week and have the grandkids along.