Jon F mn..trailer question

Jon,

Read your daily funnies, enjoyed and experience most of them. But I have a rather serious question or two about trailers...specifically ball hitch, deck-over. 7k axles, single tire, wood decked, non-commercial single jack trailer.

I saw many on line was wondering your opinion about the PJ trailers or similar. I see them goin for roughly 4500 to 5800 bucks. I was hoping for attached ramps, dovetailed, with nearly a 19 foot bed.

I am in looking to upgrade my car hauler (smaller axle capacity) to something a bit more. Also thinking that if I buy one, I'd get it sprayed for rust proofing before it had a few miles on it.

Thanks,

D.

D.

I have a 24' PJ Lo-boy. 7000# axles. Very good brakes, powder coated, pulls great. The ramps are spring loaded so it's easy for an old f@3t to lift them. The floor boards look to be good quality too. I have a 4 year old Big Tex 16' and the floor is totally rotted out already. I am not a dealer or associated with one.

Best trailer advise I can give is take a sheet of cardboard when shopping and slide underneath,
I also own a P&J and I give the company and the product both a grade A. Powder coat remains looking brand new while neighbors painted brand X trailer bought at same time looks 10 years older and never had a speak of paint underneath.

If your looking for a bumper pull trailer stay away from the PJ trailers, especially if you're pulling it with a heavy vehicle as they have a flaw in the design that could lead to serious cracking. I've fixed a couple in the past, but they were behind a 1 ton dually and a 2 ton truck. I've posted pics of this and explained it before, but if you want I could repost it. This flaw is not there in their gooseneck trailers, so no problems that I see with them.

A few things to watch for in trailers are:

Watch the suspension. Cheaper trailers will sometimes use double eye type springs. This is the type with flat straps hooked to both sides of the center equalizer with the anchor point in front for the front spring and in the rear for the rear spring. This creates a pushing situation for the rear axle and results in it being more likely you will get a bent spring and poor tire wear. A slipper spring setup is much better as the pull from the front for both axles, they also have less parts to wear out. The double eye setup is cheaper and for good reason.

Check crossmember spacing, 16-20" is about where you want to be. Someone posted a trailer brand on here a while back that had a crossmember spacing of 25" which I thought was a recipe for broken boards.

Check to make sure the wiring is secured all the way along too, sagging wires get pulled off. Other than the you won't likely get anything better one way or the other in wiring because a good job adds too much labor. It would be good if you buy a new trailer to go over the wires and make sure they are conected good and sealed up well as corrosion is the biggest wiring killer there is.

Buy your ramps with the trailer as there is a lot more time and material in ramps than it looks like. For a smaller deckover you could easy find 25% the weight in material and nearly the same hours of labor it takes to fab the main trailer frame. So unless you can make them yourself you could end up with a lot more than you think in them.

Check the welds too, they won't be perfect but make sure they aren't too ugly either.

Make sure there is at least one crossmember that is as tall as the main rails in the axle area. This is the most common area for cracking I've found. If the crossmember between the frame at the axle is not full height the frame will flex and you will get fatigue cracks. I can post some pics of this if you like too.

Watch how the deck is fastened down as some are floaters and some are screwed down. A screwed down deck will make for a less flexible trailer where a floating deck will allow more flex.

As far as paint or powder coat my experience is it's a crapshoot. I've seen both last long and look good, and both fail quicklly.

Decking is also a crspshoot, but good maintainance will keep most any deck good for 10+ years.

Hopefully this will give you some good things to watch for. If you find something you like post some pics of it or even give the name and I will give it a look to see if I see any obvious problems.

Jon,

Was looking at PJ F8 style. I didn't see the flaw you were trying to tell me about. Again, bumper pull, flat deck, pull out ramps.

http://www.pjtrailers.com/detail.cfm?ID=F8

I could "flip" their trailer to look underneath, virtually.

D.

I have a PJ F8 102 in. wide 14,000 lb. deck over bumper pull with a 21Ft. deck with 3 Ft. beaver and 3 standup ramps. I got the 12,000 lb. jack stand instead of the 10,000lb.but would get twin jack stands if had to do over again. Those front corners are reinforced on my trailer. I have had mine for over three and powder coat looks like new and no problems.

For some reason I couldn't make their website work so I could do the 360° thing, but you can see in the main pic that the design is still the same. Here is the part of the frame I'm talking about, as you can see the crossmember is a ways behind the bend in the frame.


<image src="http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/photos/mvphoto26478.jpg"/>

Here is the explaination for my position as I discussed it on another forum.



<image src="http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/photos/mvphoto26479.png"/>

With the PJ design there can be flex at that bend which could lead to cracking and eventually failure at the bend. PJ uses a heavy I-beam and they do use a full height crossmember, but it is behind the bend. They sell a lot of trailers, and I've only seen 2 that were broken, so you could very well get by. As I said the 2 that I saw that were broken were both pulled by heavy tow vehicles and were subject to maximum tongue weights, so if you are towing with say a 3/4 ton truck you will likely be ok. The rest of their design looks very good to me.

Here are some pics of another brand of trailer with a similar design to the PJ trailers, these guys went 1 step further than PJ and also used a less than full height crossmember so the bottom flange was not tied. This made theirs even worse than PJ and you can see the start of cracks from the flexing already. This trailer looked to me to be about 1 year old or so.

<image src="http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/photos/mvphoto26485.png"/>

You can see in this pic that the design is very similar to PJ trailers

<image src="http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/photos/mvphoto26486.png"/>

Here are some pics of the cracking from the frame flexing. The cracks start at the bottom of the crossmember because the web of the I-beam is held rigid there, but the bottom flange is allowed to flex due to the forces applied at the bend.




<image src="http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/photos/mvphoto26487.png"/>

<image src="http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/photos/mvphoto26488.png"/>

<image src="http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/photos/mvphoto26489.png"/>

The forces applied are the same here and on the pj trailer, but the pj has the advantage of tying the bottom flange of the I-beam. This makes theirs better than this one, but still susceptible because the tie is not right at the bend.