These are the Race Ramps RR-TR7. They have a 5.5deg approach angle and are seven feet long. You can see from this picture that the car is not yet fully on the ramp, so the car is not at the correct angle. The splitter clears the ramps, but the splitter hasn’t risen high enough to clear the flap. If I removed the flap from the trailer door, the splitter would then crash into the trailer door. I need more ramp.
No, I wasn’t going to use a bunch of random bits and pieces of stuff to get the wheels up to get over the splitter. Sure, I could’ve done a few ugly and silly things. But I’d rather do it right, do it once, and not have any issues in the future, like a piece of wood sticking through a bumper.
There are some calculators on the Race Ramps website which told me Race Ramps couldn’t help me. Determined to succeed in spite of it, I made several phone calls, took lots of measurements, and did some good old-fashioned trigonometry. SOH CAH TOA, my good friends. Oh, and this triangle calculator. In the end, I realized that the RR-TR-11-2 should work. This ramp is a two-piece design with nearly the same approach angle at 5.4 degrees, but the ramps are a full eleven feet long. With that much length, the splitter would be much higher off the ground by the time it got near the door flap.
I swallowed hard, plunked down my dollars, and ordered them. A few weeks later, they arrived.
I used to be able to load the car in front of the garage with the tow vehicle just slightly sticking out of the driveway into the street. No longer. These ramps are so long that I now have to put the trailer in the street so that I can get enough approach distance to get the car on them. They were massive alright, but would they work?
At first, I was concerned. The new ramp has a deeper notch for the trailer door to sit in. When I first tested it, the trailer door would sink too low, and the flap would get kicked up. That looked bad. I had some scrap wood lying around, so I shoved it in the notch to elevate the door a bit and did a quick test fit. As luck would have it, it looked like it would work perfectly. There was a mild concern about the door flap being at a slightly higher angle than the trailer ramp, but I crossed my fingers and got the car ready for loading again.
The splitter gets over the flap and clears the door. We can also adjust the wood spacer block that we’re using in the notch on the Race Ramp. Overall, it worked! But next, we had to validate that the tie-down solution would also work.
4 comments
I certainly understand your choice in winches, but just for those with more budget in mind I’ve been pleased with the meager 2500 lb winch I have on my open deck trailer. While I am equipped to run a snatch block if needed, so far I’ve been able to pull a GMC Envoy (~5000 lbs) up a set of 7′ ramps on a trailer without drop axles.
That said, I wouldn’t expect that winch to be able to pull a vehicle with something like a locked up wheel onto the trailer.
With an open-deck trailer and a not-too-crazy angle on the approach, a 2500lb rated winch can haul a 3000lb car. The key word is can. A little overhead won’t hurt. You’re absolutely right on the snatch blocks, and we made that comment in the Winch2Go article that’s linked in the intro paragraph.
With only one wheel dragging, a 17,000lb rated winch should probably be able to get the car on. It likely won’t be fun. It’d probably be easier to try to get a jack under that corner and do some fishy stuff. But, either way, you’re far more likely to get a broken car onto a trailer with a 17,000lb rated winch than with a 2500lb rated winch with only a snatch block. And, hey, you can still use a snatch block with that 17,000lb rated winch to get even more ugly pulling power!
To be clear, I haven’t used the snatch block yet.
Next you gotta get a monster slide in truck camper for the F-250, hitch and extension from Torklift to go with that schwanky new to you enclosed trailer. Then when it’s pouring buckets outside, the car is dry inside and you’re pounding beers inside the camper. Everybody wins. It also keeps the morning dew off the car.