jack_the_bear
Member
We just completed our first trip in our new 5th wheel - Americ-Camp F299RLS. We decided to go somewhere nearby in case we had some problems and that turned out to have been a good decision. After we got set up in our space at Meeman Shelby Forest State Park just outside of Memphis, TN we were unable to get either the furnace or the water heater to come on. After reading the instruction manuals for these several times, and becoming very frustrated, I finally gave up and called the dealer where the unit was purchased. This was on Friday afternoon, the day after Thanksgiving, and almost everyone there had gone home for the day, but we managed to get their finance officer before she left. After we described our problem to her, she called one of their technicians at home, and he drove out to where we were camped and helped us through the problems. How is that for customer service? It turned out that the batteries in the remote control for the furnace were so weak that it couldn't send a signal to the thermostat to turn the furnace on - simple enough to fix. The water heater bypass valve had been left open when we picked it up at the dealer, and closing that fixed the problem there. I mostly stood around feeling pretty stupid about how easy the solutions were. Everything else worked beautifully on our new trailer.
I do have a question about backing up with the thing. A great many years ago, while in college, I had a job as a house painter and had to drag a small 8 foot utility trailer around behind my truck. I had no trouble backing that trailer into pretty much any space that was required, so when we got the 5th wheel I was not anticipating any problems backing it either. Boy, was I wrong! It seems like there is a long delay between my turning the wheel on the truck and there being a noticable change of direction in the trailer while backing. This led to two problems. At first I had not pulled forward far enough so that the back end of the trailer would begin to turn in time to enter the parking space. After I finally got that part right the second problem would crop up. When it would look like I needed to straighten the trailer for alignment with the parking space, I would turn the steering wheel the other way to straighten, but it would take another 5-8 feet for the trailer to respond and I was too near the edge. It took me about 10 tries to finally get the thing backed in and straightened properly. Is this something that is just going to take a lot of practice, or am I making it much harder than it needs to be? Is there some trick to this that I'm not aware of? I'm considering getting some traffic cones to set up in a deserted parking lot somewhere and just practicing over and over.
I do have a question about backing up with the thing. A great many years ago, while in college, I had a job as a house painter and had to drag a small 8 foot utility trailer around behind my truck. I had no trouble backing that trailer into pretty much any space that was required, so when we got the 5th wheel I was not anticipating any problems backing it either. Boy, was I wrong! It seems like there is a long delay between my turning the wheel on the truck and there being a noticable change of direction in the trailer while backing. This led to two problems. At first I had not pulled forward far enough so that the back end of the trailer would begin to turn in time to enter the parking space. After I finally got that part right the second problem would crop up. When it would look like I needed to straighten the trailer for alignment with the parking space, I would turn the steering wheel the other way to straighten, but it would take another 5-8 feet for the trailer to respond and I was too near the edge. It took me about 10 tries to finally get the thing backed in and straightened properly. Is this something that is just going to take a lot of practice, or am I making it much harder than it needs to be? Is there some trick to this that I'm not aware of? I'm considering getting some traffic cones to set up in a deserted parking lot somewhere and just practicing over and over.