I would love to exchange notes and thoughts.
The Ascape being the biggest camping type trailer I have towed I’m currently trying to pin down tire pressure and weigh distribution so that I can arrive at my campsite without the contents of cupboards and fridge having been rearranged by bounce/gravity.
I’m wondering what other owners are experiencing. Have you found sweet spots for loading, tire pressure, etc.
Leave a comment here or email me directly at sunriselakeca @ iCloud.com (without the spaces around the @).
Take you loaded ascape to a weigh station and get a loaded weight. Using the standard range for tongue weight of 10-15% compute the range to be in. When you load your Ascape set a bathroom scale under the tongue at front and using a 2 by 4 od 4 by 4 cut to a proper length so when you place under the tongue after raising up the tongue then lower down on to wood piece to get a measure of tongue weight. Check your range computed to see where you are in the range. This will get you in the ball park and help you load the trailer.
The wood block should be cut to a length so when the trailer is lowered on to it the height will approximate the heitch height of the car. once done you can do this in a couple of minutes and recheck after loading.
Thanks for posting this Lee. I hadn’t done any research re trailer bounce/content movement, primarily because the little ProLite had no bounce, but of course it didn’t have storage cupboards nor fridge. We used an Engle fridge that lived in back of our SUV.
I’ll adjust… but before accepting defeat I’m going to check wheel balancing and shift weight around a bit next trip. My tongue weight is at 250 and I’m going to try and get it closer to 10-12% of trailer weight (1720 lbs.)
Hi Heinz, thought I’d repost our conversation for other readers. my wife and I took our Ascape out last month for a 2500 mile shakedown trip to Texas and back. We experienced 2 issues that I have since resolved.
1. The fridge door popped open dumping all the contents out on the floor. Twice!
The latch the holds the fridge shut was not seated firmly enough to hold the door shut. This was a design issue. To fix this I removed the plastic notch from the top of the door and placed a washer under it to raise it up so that it latches firmly now.
2. The cassette for the toilet slid over the latch handle stop, (toward the back of the trailer), thus misaligning the seal. This prevents you from turning the flush handle and can cause waste to trickle down around the cassette. ?
I have made it part of my setup routine to check the flush handle so we get no surprises when my wife needs to use it at night. But to ensure no further issues I placed an ice cream stick in the notch where the cassette handle latches. It’s a perfect fit and no more popping out.
As for cabinet shifts, unfortunately that’s the nature of the beast and not unique to the Ascape. RV movement is described as a 6.0 earthquake. Everything moves. To minimize the affect we took measurements of the cabinets and went to Walmart and the 99cent store and bought plastic containers for our food and breakables. On Amazon, we also bought small spring loaded adjustable curtain rods which we put just inside the cabinet doors and just inside the refrigerator door for each shelf. I’ve seen that some people use netting and small bungee cords too.
Hope this helps. I’ve looked the rig over and there are the typical shortcuts taken by the manufacturer but in general it’s a nice little rig. It has everything in it we need for now, is light weight, and sturdy where it counts.
Best regards,
Lee