Star Dreamer

We are the odd balls here. We have a custom built Toyhauler that is just under 47' long that we can put a full size van in or carry our 7 seat Dodge Journey SUV. We are at just under 73' long with a truck long enough that we can also put our smart car sideways on the truck. I feel if I did not need the smart car, I could shorten up the truck to get close to the 65' length but I would lose some storage capacity.

For a short term stay, we were at Lake Corpus Christi State park near Mathis, TX which has full hooks and some longer pull thrus in the Javelina campground. It might be a longer drive that what you want to do. We did see a couple of RV parks off I37 near Edroy, TX that might have larger spots for a longer term.

The Argosy is a hard unit to find and at a reasonable price. The steps that come out are nice for getting into it but I understand parts are hard to find. Jeff Beyer has one but haven't seen him on the forum recently. You might be better to consider a shorter Aero cab. Our Freightliner Century is around 30' with it singled short and could even be shorter if you do not plan to haul a car on the back. Have you checked the resource guide for info on Virginia?

Problem with Ft Lauderdale is it is land locked to the west with Alligator Alley and ocean to the right. Try going North by West Palm Beach. There is a KOA that looks like it might have larger sites.

Two options both using an universal hitch like this one. https://www.etrailer.com/RV-and-Camper-Hitch/Curt/C13702.html?feed=npn&gclid=Cj0KCQiA-OeBBhDiARIsADyBcE52jXK3f4r0cCI8p_YLIIf0O-TBimIakQBu6Shqc6mHyPCpD4Iw5SEaAiEGEALw_wcB 1st option, if you have a structure below the ramp box, mount the brackets to that structure if strong enough. 2nd option, add some brackets to the outside of the frame rails by the ET hitch which will allow you to mount the horizontal tube just behind the ET hitch but below it and above your light bar. Then use a drop receiver to get the ball at the correct height. It will block your plate but as long as you only use the ball mount when you are pulling a trailer, you should be ok.

We have a 2005 Freightliner with a 14L Detroit and a 10 speed Ultrashift. Since ours is an older one, the trans does not skip gears automatically (you can manually do it if you want). We just use two pedals when backing up and can hitch up to the trailer without banging it in now after practice. We just use R1 even though it has an R2 also. Keeps it nice and slow. We are not in a rush, so I just let the truck do its own shifting. At 50k# total weight, we are not the fastest away from the stop light but I try not to let it bother me. Our Detroit is the larger one so fuel mileage is not as good as we could probably get with a 12.7L but the truck was nice enough with all the other items we needed so we just live with it. Sometimes you just have to compromise unless you want to order one new with the features you want. The newer automated trans are nicer and if we ever decide to get a newer truck, I would get one of them. I have no need to worry about what gear I am in and can concentrate on not hitting anything when turning and the road around me. I do like the power we have for going up the hills and the engine brake for going down! On steeper down hills, I will put the truck in manual mode and then in 9th gear usually to help keep the speed down.

I would probably consider changing to an electric HDT if the range was about 1000 miles (enough for us to go a few days without recharging) and a way for the truck to plug into a 50amp RV outlet to recharge. Right now most campgrounds include electric in the daily rate when you are staying less than a month (but that will probably change when they realize I am recharging my truck to head out the next day!), so in theory our fuel costs would not be very much. It will be interesting as to how they will come up with a high speed recharging system for over the road trucks and how much would they charge and by what method, (wattage, amps, volts, something else?)

I finally got around to doing my registration for the rally. We went last year and we're a little lonely with only a couple of HDTs there. Hopefully all is well and is able to be held this year.

We prefer the 5th wheel, easier to hook up and no safety chains to have to deal with. If you cannot see the gooseneck ball from the driver's seat it may take some time to get use to getting the trailer in position as you have to be right on. A 5th wheel is a little more forgiving. We always changed our gooseneck ball trailers to 5th wheel pins.

The biggest problem with designing an air ride hitch to sit on the top of the frame rails and still keep hitch head at a normal height of around 47" is the space required for the air bags and the pivoting hitch head and making sure the design works well enough for the loads and forces imposed on it. Usually the hitch head will be higher than normal and in some cases your trailer can handle it, in others you need to modify and in others it may put you over maximum height. Changing pin box will help keep the overal length with the trailer shorter but you need to do some careful measuring. The tight area is usually when doing a turn and the truck is at about a 45 degree to the trailer where the corner of the truck gets closest to the gooseneck drop on the trailer. The farther back you push the pin on the trailer the closer this distance becomes. Measure from you current pin to the vertical surface of the gooseneck. Then measure from your hitch pin location on you truck to the farthest point on the corner of the truck bed or fenders or mudflap hanger. You want at least 3-6" of clearance to allow for dips, etc... If you have more, you could move the pin rearward bit be sure to also consider any access to the front compartment on the trailer if you have doors there that you might need to get into if truck is hooked up.

Check the for sale adds on the forum as sometimes the HDTs are posted there. There is also a few facebook groups for the HDT's if you are on facebook. The best place to learn about these is at a HDT Rally. Next one is in April in TN, June for the Rally in Idaho and the National rally is in Oct in Kansas. We have a toyhauler that we had built in 2019 near you in Apache Junction at Dune Sport (sales office is in Mesa), you may want to do a tour of their factory. They build mainly to order so it helps if you have some RV experience already. Contact me by PM if you want more info. We also put a smart car on the back of the HDT. The best place to get an HDT converted if you do not know what you are doing is RVH Lifestyles in Kansas.

Driving bobtail and as long as you are not commercial and you are registered as an RV you will not need to stop at scales unless it says all RVs too. We drove ours from SC to AZ to pick up our new trailer with the smart car on our bed. We had to use some wood ramps to help one of our grand dogs up into the semi to go for a ride. Worked good with the wife helping him, probably needed to be a bit wider. Have fun!

If you are registering as an RV, can't you just insure as an RV? Tell them it will also be used as an RV and maybe pull a trailer on occasion. Just like a class A motorhome would be that has a hitch on it. Ours is insured with State Farm as an RV and can be used bobtail.

We use Discount ramps 16' long version (2 8' ramps with a center support) as we need to load other items than just the smart. It works well, but does take longer to set up and tear down and needs more space for all the ramps and support.

We recently had a PM service done at Speedco. It was $327 for the oil, oil filters, fuel filter, and grease. It was cheaper that what we have paid for at Freightliner. We have a Detroit Series 60 14L so different engines are different costs. We have changed the oil ourselves but the bin to capture 10 gals on oil is quite large and installing the new oil filters with oil in them is a pain, so I just take it in for this service.

If you have a typical 12k front axle, you are already close to be overloaded. It will help if your hitch is mounted behind the rear axle by taking some weight off of the front axle. While every truck handles a little differently, our Freightliner Century is singled short. Our base front axle weight is only 9780#. When we weighed at the HDT rally, we offloaded about 2k off the front axle with our Toyhauler which that day had a 6250# pin weight. Our hitch at that time was around 72" behind the rear axle. I have since done a few changes and recently weighed our setup again, this time with a smart car on the bed, hitch moved as far forward as possible by 8", different loading in the Toyhauler which reduced pin weight to 5840#. All of these changes reduced our front axle offload to 1560#, at on axle is now at 8220#. We have not noticed any unusual handling in the truck with the lighter front axle weight and we put on around 18k miles with configuration. But we also avoid bad weather driving but have driven in heavy rain but slow our speed down. I don't think there is any actual good formulas that say how light the front axle can be, I would think it would be a total percentage of the truck weight but it could also be affected by how far the hitch is behind the rear axle. I am going to add some weight to my front end to help some just in case!

The price sounds good for that many miles but you will want to have a good repair budget to take care of things that will come up like air bags, shocks, brakes, tires, airlines, connectors, valves (a lot of the little items that add up) plus a budget for an engine rebuild and transmission / clutch rebuild just in case. Otherwise it is just a gamble, may last forever, may not.

We have a friend in Western Australia that drives Road Trains. I will have to ask him if he does any river crossings. This is his truck. https://i.imgur.com/JVVgu7Bl.jpg

Glad you had a great trip and turned the DW over to the dark side! After 8 years of having our HDT and having our smart car for 2 years, we are getting ready to do the first trip with it up on the truck bed pulling our new trailer with our custom van in the trailer. Smart is loaded and I will be hooking up the trailer today and loading the van Saturday when to rain has stopped. I will try to get some pictures.

The TA Petro by us near Florence SC is showing a .63 discount which is one of the highest discounts I have seen.

I understand it is an issue with the column mounted ignition switch and the earlier models did not have it column mounted.

I found this on the smart car forums. https://www.smartcarofamerica.com/threads/key-stuck-in-ignition-2016-key-lock-solenoid-stuck.157037/

If you use the 5th wheel pin to gooseneck ball with the commercial hitch, like mentioned previously, you need to lock the pivoting so hitch does not move plus you need to come up with a place to hook up the safety chains that are required when you have a gooseneck ball.

Sounds like we are one of the few that had diesel fuel issues but mainly it was due to the design of the trucks fueling system. We had a 2003 Chevy Duramax pickup and it's fuel system was designed before the 2007 fuel change. The newer fuel wreck havoc with the fuel injectors such that we went through about 21 injectors (8 were replaced under warranty). The fuel system filters would not catch the crap that was in the fuel and the high fuel pressure and the crap destroyed the injectors. We finally had to pump all our fuel into an auxiliary tank and then use a dual filter system to pump into the trucks tank. This helped to extend the life of the injectors but we got rid of the truck at around 240k miles after putting on about 70k miles ourselves. That experience did not stop us from going to another diesel with our HDT. We regularly change fuel filters with each oil change and carry a spare filter with us. We have a Davco fuel filter system do we can see as the filter is getting close to needing to be replaced. We have put over 100k miles on our HDT (has 540k on the odometer) without any fuel issues, although we did have the fuel gell up on us one winter and had the replace the fuel filter before we started using the truck in the Spring.

Thanks for the update