goducks10 wrote:

Whats your tow vehicle and TT. If you have a 3/4 ton or more you may not even need WD. Depending on what TT you have you need to find the real dry weight add about 1000-1200lbs (average cargo) to the dry weight number. X it by 10-15% and thats what your tongue weight SHOULD be. Then depending on whether you have stuff in your TV you may need to compensate for that some with your WD bar size. In other words if you have a 1/2 ton and have a 550lb TW and add 500lbs to the truck you should go with 1000lb er's or more. Your WD bars have to lift the TT tongue as well as lift the xtra weight in the truck thats made it sag. On a 3/4 ton you could get buy with 600lb er's because the truck can easily support the xtra 500lbs in the bed. Using the GVWR can be misleading at times. My TT has a GVWR of 8400lbs, but has a dry weight of 6189lbs. (door jamb sticker). Wife and I only add about 1000lbs so we are at 7200+ or -. We would be hard pressed to add 2211 lbs to our TT. With that being said our bars would need to be 1260lb if we went buy the 15% of GVWR rule since our TW would be 1260lb. In reality our TW is 900 + or -. We still use 1200lb bars because we put stuff in the the truck and have a canopy on the truck.

Atlee wrote:

One key number I do not have right now is the actual payload available.

Still haven't weighted it on CAT scales, but the sticker inside the driver's door which has the tire size, etc indicated the following. "Including passengers and cargo, the max cargo weight is 1,496#. That's a little lower than I thought, but probably factors in the 4 wheel drive system.

kpratte wrote:

That is the payload capacity.. If you go here: https://www.fleet.ford.com/showroom/rv_trailer_towing/2005/2005_default.asp and look under "Slide in Campers" it gives the payloads. Some of the newer Ford's had a Max Tow package, least it did in 2010 when I was looking, that bumped the payload from the ~1500 to ~1900#.

- Ken