Will a Ford 450 chassis work...

[DD396]

For pulling a trailer in the neighborhood of #6500?

My lady and I are thinking of going with a C-class, to travel, and tow my Jeep on a carhauler trailer.

Any ifo will be appreciated, we are new to RVing and are looking to buy very soon.

Thanks!

[j-d]

Until recently every E450 (and probably the original version called "E-Super-Duty" when it came out in the late 1990's) had a GCWR of 20,000-pounds with GVWR of 14,050. So, 5,950 even if fully loaded, GIVEN it had supplemental braking. Several model years ago, they went to 22,000 and 14,500, again with brakes. Modern E350 GVWR is 12,500, a ton less than E450. You can find a coach that COULD be on E350 but IS on E450. That combination would leave lots of towing capacity.

[pauldub]

You might want to consider a tow dolly. It will get you home with a half broken Jeep and it's usually the front that gets broken.

[tatest]

The chassis works fine for towing. Since its introduction it has been popular as the platform for commercial vehicles dedicted to RV delivery. Even with a short flatbed, toolbox, and hitches, the cab chassis comes in not much over 6000 pounds, leaving a tow capacity near seven tons.

Problem comes in when you load it down with a house, and extend the frame way beyond the end of the factory frame. Weight of a house uses up as much as four tons of the capacity it has asa chassis, and extending the frame makes it hard to balance hitch loads across the chassis, and often precludes use of weight distribution hitches.

Often what towing capacity is left in the chassis after it has been made into a C motorhome (and this could very well be in excess of 6000 for a small motorhome on E-450) is useful for flat towing, not so much for towing trailers with heavy hitch loads.

So are you interested in finding a E-450 chassis, or looking for a motorhome built on the chassis. A tow vehicles, two very different things.

[DD396]

Thanks all! Trying to get research done, so we can settle on what we want.

My Jeep is very roadworthy, but we do as much rock crawling as possible, and future Jeep mods are coming.

The main reason I want to trailer tow, versus flat tow, is if I break the Jeep on an offroading excursion, I can still get home before having to fix it.

[pauldub]

It's a whole lot easier and cheaper to flat tow your Jeep. If you can drive your Jeep on the highway without any issues, it should flat tow just fine. If it's so modified that it's not roadworthy, then you'll need to trailer it.

[Hank85713]

You will need to weigh both, our B+ can tow 5000lbs supposedly, with 300lb hitch weight! The trailer if a 4 wheel is going to be close to 1000+ and the jeep will weigh close to 3500-4000. my 94 ranger surprised me, it weighed in at 3700+- some.

[Golden_HVAC]

Hi,

It depends. On the manufacture and the way they extended the frame behind the factory framework. On my 1997 there is a 18" extension installed by Fleetwood. I have a 30' model with a 190" wheelbase. Some of Fleetwoods models that year had the 190" Wheelbase with a tag axle on a 38' motorhome. That would be a 9 or 10 foot long extension behind the factory frame work.

In 1997, Fleetwood rated all of their motorhomes to tow 3,500 pounds, no matter how long the extension was. By 2000, Ford was producing 18,000 and 20,000 GVWR F-53 chassis with 19.5" rims, good for much more weight than my 97 with 16" rims designed for pickups and passenger vans. So they started rating the Fleetwoods for about 5,000 pounds on the gas models. They also had more powerful engines and better - stronger transmissions.

I am not sure what manufactures made a RV with a 7,500 pound tow rating, giving it an extra 750 pounds of cargo capacity to carry the heavy hitch weight found on a car hauler.

I know that the Alpine diesel pushers had a 10,000 pound hitch bolted to their frames, and have a 400 HP diesel engine to power it up and down the mountains of Washington where they are built.

You might also want to look at the Supernova by Gulfstream. Those that where built on a International chassis are rated to tow 10,000 pounds, and have a big diesel engine to power it. It is a class C built on a 25,000 pound truck chassis. One like used in the larger U-Haul trucks.

Other manufactures have used the Ford F-550 truck to make class C motorhomes on it's 19,500 pound capacity chassis.

The E-450 chassis is limited to only 14,050 pounds. Even rarer is the 2005 E-550 chassis with 19.5" rims, and a much higher GVWR. However it did not take off, and Ford stopped making them after just one model year. I saw a tile floor installer who had a E-550 truck with a 20' body on the back of it. It was able to tow a lot of weight too.

Remember that your intended trailer will have about 800 - 1,000 pounds of hitch weight. So when you look at the typical class C, with only about 1,500 pounds of cargo capacity (including the water tanks, and everything else) you do not have much capacity to carry your camping gear and 800 pounds of hitch weight. Take the RV to a scale. If you find a 12,000 pound motorhome on a 14,050 GVWR chassis, that is the rare one, probably without a slide out.

Good luck on your search.

Fred.

[gearhead143]

Should work fine. It will be slow on the steep grades. I have a 2004 E450 27P Minnie Winnie and pulled my show truck (1990 Chevy SS454)in a enclosed trailer without any problems, but as I said, it was slow on the steep grades. I am going to install the Banks Power Pack system this winter to see if I can get up the hills a little quicker.

[PatrickA51]

You should be able to tow a Jeep 4 down, I see people pulling Jeep Wranglers all over with class-c RV's all the time.