[DK on the road]

Interesting discussion and timely for me. I have had a Roadmaster 8000 since the late 90's towing a F350, then a Raptor, now back to a F350. When I first built and installed a base plate for my F350, No readily made adaptors were available like they are today.

That first base plate broke off at slow speeds at a highway convergence in very heavy traffic at maybe 10 mph. It slowly drifted over lanes from #6 lane to #3 where I was able to park my coach on the shoulder and run across stopped traffic that was in Awe of this truck making a slow "cut off" cars. Thank God nobody was hurt, or vehicles damaged. I was by myself. then came the smaller problem of getting both vehicles home. That story is for another time.

The Roadmaster wasn't damaged, it was locked into the broken base plate. All in all, I think I used that RM towing 7k lbs trucks for about 100K miles. I have been noticing all of the joints have some wiggle. If I counted all the joints, I'd say 4 points(?), plus some wear into the receiver it was giving me a wiggle when breaking into a turn. In other words, I can feel the slack being taken up or extending thru my chassis at the steering wheel. So, I bought the Blue Ox about 2 weeks ago. It's designed to tow 16K. It very beefy. It weighs 2xs as much as the RM and I hope to get 100K miles out of it. After all this I even shimmed my 2 1/2" receiver with 18g sheet metal. I want no movement back there.

So, buy heavier duty than you need. Verify connections and looseness each hookup. I found a loose bolt once on my Raptor mounting bracket. I second the vote for Air Force one braking systems.

Karen and I travel about 15k miles a year, so my components like tow accessories get used a lot.