help with door stickers - weights

Hi
the yellow door sticker on my new cyclone shows the vehicle weight being ~11800 lbs. the gross weighting says 14000 lbs. the axle weights on the side sticker says 7k lbs each.

while at the rv show there was a heartland rep that said that the axles can carry 14k load and that the "5th wheel" (hitch load in bed of truck) can carry ~2500lbs of load. he's saying that they (heartland) does this to keep the advertised weight on the tags of the trailer below the 15k lbs limit when in actually the trailer then can gross out at 16500 (14k + 2500) lbs.

he also said that heartland takes into account for water weights when they post the cargo weight for the trailer. the tag shows something like 2k lbs of cargo and water at something like 960 lbs full load.

any idea if this is indeed correct? if so, then a 16k hitch won't work and I should go larger, say 18k correct? or is a 16k hitch ok because they say they are rated for 16k trailer and a 4k pin weight.

my numbers might not be exactly correct, the idea of my questions are more along the line what these weight are actully saying. does it really mean that you can load the axles with 14k, and the hitch with 2500lbs? or is it saying at a trailer weight of 14k lbs there is only 11500 lbs on the axles with the 2500 on the hitch? to me that doesn't see logical and it will end up being over a 16k loaded trailer.

thoughts?

Remember your hitch weight is subtracted from the total weight. For example: Total weight is 14000 minus 2500 hitch weight = 11500 weight on axles. 11500 divided by two axles = 6250 per axle. 7000 axle is okay.

Doug, what model cyclone do you have and what is the GVRW on the white label on the side? It should be just above the yellow sticker. The 11,800 on the yellow sticker indicates the "Unloaded" weight of your rig. You should subtract that number from the GVRW for your carrying capacity. If your GVRW is 14,000 and your unloaded weight is 11,800 then your carrying capacity would be 2,200# I'm guessing Heartland uses 7K axles on the toy haulers with 2 axles just for a safety measure. When you have a bike or atv in the garage aft of the axles it actually puts more weight on the axles than the true weight of the "toy". Just simple math. Logic says that Heartland could have put a higher GVRW on the trailer. Why they don't, I don't know. At least you know your rig has heavier axles and will pretty much handle whatever you need it to.

we bought a new 3010. the white label says gvwr of 14k i believe. as I was trying to say originally, was the rep was saying that the 2200#'s you mentioned does not include the water weight, that it was already subtracted prior to listing cargo weight of 2200#s. its all so confusing to me. I realize it is simple math but i'm finding that different manufactures come up with these numbers in a different way.

my overal concern was the hitch. if I needed to add that 14k#'s to the hitch weight, then that would tell me I should have a 18k hitch.

thanks
doug

dougw said:

we bought a new 3010. the white label says gvwr of 14k i believe. as I was trying to say originally, was the rep was saying that the 2200#'s you mentioned does not include the water weight, that it was already subtracted prior to listing cargo weight of 2200#s. its all so confusing to me. I realize it is simple math but i'm finding that different manufactures come up with these numbers in a different way.

my overal concern was the hitch. if I needed to add that 14k#'s to the hitch weight, then that would tell me I should have a 18k hitch.

thanks
doug

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Doug, if you don't have your hitch yet, it certainly wouldn't be a bad idea to go for the 18K hitch. Mainly because there's always that remote chance you will get a bigger trailer one day. If you already have the 16K hitch you should be fine as long as you don't grossly exceed your trailers GVRW of 14,000# With an empty weight of 11,800 it would be quite a stretch to do that.