King Pin Stablizers -- Yea or Nay?

[mmomega]

We have a tripod and only used it very few times simply because I never found it to make a significant difference. I say this simply because the front of the trailer was fully supported by the front landing jacks, my thought being the tripod is only 8ft or so ahead of the landing jacks and it was not really supporting anything more. The suspension and wheels have some give and cause a majority of the rocking motion.
Now on that, I agree with all that say the bar stabilizers make a difference because they help decrease the side-to-side motion, this makes more sense to put money in to. The X-Chocks also help quite a bit, this also makes sense because they help reduce a back-to-forth rocking motion.
Also, for those that have the newer RV's with hydraulics, these jacks can raise the tires of of the ground if you want to. I tried this just to mess around, thus removing the suspension from the picture, and you could tell the trailer felt a lot more "planted". Also most no rocking at all other than what you would expect from the long frame flexing a bit. Now I think if I had one more set of stabilizer jacks just forward of the wheels then that would almost eliminate all rocking.

 

[TxCowboy]

JD, interesting comments and thanks for posting. I am also considering the X-Chocks for exactly the reasons you suggested.

Just wondering about using the hydraulic leveling jacks to actually unload the wheels, shocks, and springs. Can they really support the entire trailer weight? Is that really a good idea?

(And I like your idea of a third set of leveling and/or stabilizing jacks directly forward to the wheels.)

 

[mmomega]

I mean you could lift the tires if you just wanted to, each jack is a 10,000lb jack x 4 jacks and the trailer is about 15,000lb. Now I don't do it when we go camping unless the auto level system happens to lift the tires off the ground during the leveling process, which it has done twice so far. I just did it one day at the house to see if taking the suspension out of the picture made a big difference and it did, I put our aluminum tripod under the kingpin and I couldn't tell it was there personally but some others may be able to tell.
Ours has the 4 hydraulic jacks and a set of electric scissor jack style stabilizers at the very rear, so I'm thinking of trying to add another set just forward of the wheels then it should be a very stable setup. Just to stiffen the center portion of the frame instead of the springs, shocks and wheels trying to do that.
Also saw a post on Facebook from Beletti where his system lifted the tires off the ground about 3" or so while leveling.

Now I do have to post that the manual states not to lift all of the wheels do to it may make the trailer unstable yet I found the opposite. Maybe in high winds this wouldn't be a good idea and like I stated I do not do this when I set up typically just once to "test" how the suspension affects the rocking motion.

 

[TxCowboy]

OK, JD. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for responding!

 

[Cimriver]

Installed the SteadyFast system last weekend. We haven't been out yet, but they sure seem to make quite a difference. The installation took about three hours. We ran into an issue with the routing of the gas pipe that we had to deal with, but thanks to a heads up from TravelTiger were prepared to deal with it. That probably added half an hour to the install time.

Looks like a very quality product. The owner of the company that sells the product includes his cell phone number for questions that come up during the install. We did call him and had a call back within ten minutes. Amazing service! Also made in the USA.

We will know this weekend how they perform!

 

[TxCowboy]

Gordon, thanks for responding. Looking forward to your feedback on the Steadyfast system.