Question,Towing a trailer

[Kevin54]

The truck is wired for both electric and electric over hydraulic trailer brakes.The trailer itself will have brakes.
I have 16 2"x27' Erickson straps that should be lots I would think I also will have a tarp to cover it to keep it dry.
I wasn't sure about the different State laws,do you have to pull in the weigh scales if they are lit up?

CC

You are good to go and shouldn't have any problems. Just make sure before you take off that the tags are up to date and the lights and turn signals work. Also make sure you have enough ratchet straps to hold things down. Ten miles down the road and you'll feel like you been doing it forever. The only other thingt to worry about is the stopping distance. It takes a little longer to stop than without a trailer so you have to compensate for that. Drive safe and drive defensively because of other drivers that don't pay attention.

 

[jvitez]

Your 1996 truck was designed in about 1985. That was the stone-age compared to today's engineering tools. Back then they were still designing in clay and they might do a single, manual Finite Element Analysis on the big components. Everything else was done "by book" or layout standards the company had developed. There was very little customization. I think Ford ran those "Twin I beams" until about 1995 or so.

Today they can run a million iterations of FEA on every component of the vehicle at once. They can make minor tweaks over and over again. They can try different alloys for each part and see how it affects the whole.

They have suspension optimizers that pinpoint the location of the mounts precisely enough, and get the spring rates and damping rates to create the kind of suspension movement and compliance they want.

So yeah, it's no surprise to me that a newly designed truck can tow rings around an older one.

Very interesting! Thanks for posting this information. I always thought it was marketing that was pushing GVWR's up, sort of a hopeful "it should be alright because the average doesn't tow at the limit very often" kind of idea. Now I know there's actual science behind it: von Bertalanffy's Systems Theory brought to vehicles. Cool! (One of my professors was von Bertalanffy's son BTW, a great and humble man).