Rumline

The silver lining is: the more you hear something loud, the less you hear (it).

Yes.

If you are talking to me, the crates I use are linked in my first post, but here it is again a little more clearly: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007IUPR0I According to an answered question they are 11H x 18-5/8W X 13D. I have not measured mine. Overland linked these in his Snowball thread: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XGBDJMD/ According to an answered question they are 11H x 18-3/4W x 13D

Thank you for posting all of these impressions. Probably my favorite day of an Alaska cruise several years ago was when my wife and I rented a Jeep in Skagway and drove up into the Yukon. We made it as far as Whitehorse, and did a bunch of off-highway driving. Saying that the scenery was beautiful is so insufficient. I would dearly love to get back there one day. This is somewhat indulgent of me to hijack your thread but I thought I'd share my favorite photo from that day. Emerald Lake, north of Carcross, in far from ideal lighting conditions:

I'm not sure that I would go for the folding table top but what I liked about rideadeuce's solution is having the vertical bar long enough to be able to rotate the table around over the top of the nightstand. That would be really nice. But there's still the problem of it blocking the nightstand drawer. What I'd really like to do is rip out the Oliver-installed bracket, cut my own basement access door, and implement your mounting solution. But that's a lot of effort so I'm going to wait and see if we miss having the table at all. Thanks! Please do let me know what your basement looks like.

Here's a photo that shows my basement as it is now. I didn't take one that shows the plastic sheet as it was from the factory. It's the white thing on the right. You can see there's a notch cut out of the top where it used to sit around one of the cross members and in front of that long horizontal (athwart-ship) beam. Near the bottom right corner of the blue crate you can see what looks like a white arced scuff mark. That's where the bottom of the white plastic sheet used to sit. So in the current configuration I can fit two crates in width-wise (oriented with their long dimension fore/aft with respect to the trailer) and be even with the electric compartment wall. In the photo there's two in there, the green one behind the blue. Then in front of those I can fit one more crate plus my toolbag and compressor on top and I still have about 3"x18" next to the crate. I can't quite fit two of my crates lengthwise next to each other in the "front" space like Overland can. Maybe my crates are just a tad wider.

We got home a couple of days ago with our new Ollie and I thought I'd share some thoughts that may be useful to other prospective / waiting buyers. On factory options: ■ Solar is hands-down the easiest choice. Keeps batteries topped off all the time. Allows you to run the fridge on DC while driving and not run down the batteries. Yes it charges off the tow vehicle wiring, but I doubt this would be enough to keep the batteries charged when also running the fridge. ■ The Lagun table was the worst choice for us. I liked the idea, but in practice the table is too bulky in storage (a 3" pipe sticks out from the bottom of the table, plus the arm is not small either) and we're too worried about scratching the surface. We don't like leaving it up while sleeping, and since we're already converting the side dinette to a bed every night for our son, we don't need yet another daily stow/deploy operation. Also now that Overland has pioneered a better mounting method, I would never order this from the factory; do it yourself and get a cleaner solution. ■ The KTT Latex Mattress upgrade was definitely worth it for us. Very comfortable and slept cool in the warm weather we experienced. Yes we had the AC on but we turned it down (raised the thermostat) for bedtime. Man that thing is loud! Anyway we also bought the plastic looped mat to enhance air flow after following this thread. We ended up buying Hypervent from Defender since it was cheaper and looked to be the same material as Aire-Flow. ■ The WeBoost cell booster was a win. We camped mostly in state parks on the way back, many were far off the interstates. It gave us a functioning connection in several places where we otherwise had none. Sometimes it didn't give us a functioning data connection, but even being able to make/receive calls and text messages was great. However having to hold your phone close to the antenna mounted over the dinette is not ideal. I want to plug the output from the WeBoost into a mobile router to enable our devices to connect anywhere in/around the trailer. One day. ■ We ordered the shower track but haven't purchased a shower curtain yet. Wiping down the toilet seat and area around the toilet is not fun. Plus a lot of water seems to collect there so it really saturated our towel (that we keep only for that purpose). So the jury is still out on the shower track but I don't think that having a curtain will be useless. ■ Truma tankless water heater was great. When on full hookups all three of us took nice long showers and never had to worry about running out. Maybe not "needed" but neither is a $65K camper. We got it for the performance but also the ease of use and maintenance. I found Reed's posts on this topic influential (which of course I cannot find right now). Other noteworthy stuff we bought: ■ 18" milk crates. Overland mentioned this in his Snowball thread. I was excited to essentially have the basement packed before we left home to pick up the trailer. I bought these because I wanted to organize my stuff logically: blocks chocks and jacks went in red, water hoses and filters in blue, electric and gas in green. Black stays in the garage and is where I put the hitch, tow mirrors, etc. Perfect. Except that when we picked up the trailer, there was this white plastic sheeting material closing off part of the basement area so the milk crates wouldn't fit in width-wise. I had to crawl in the basement and unscrew the sheeting from a stringer and then the stringer from the floor of the basement. I re-installed the plastic sheet all the way against the rear of the trailer with duct tape to protect the wires and hoses back there but now the milk crates fit. I can get all three in plus my toolbox and Viair compressor, and everything is so easy to pull out and find what I need. Suh-weet! ■ Water filter. Thanks to DavePhelps in this thread for turning me on to RVWaterFilterStore.com. We bought the two-canister Essential system because it seemed like the best compromise between cost, effectiveness, and convenience. We were very pleased with the results. Always had great tasting and feeling (for showers) water even when the campground water was kinda harsh. When we got home and my wife showered in our house she remarked "Meh, unfiltered water...." Also the build quality is very nice. ■ Bed sheets. After much consternation we ordered custom sheets from CustomLinensDirect. They were very soft, well-made, and fit perfectly. We supplied the measurements 75"L x 29"W x 8"D (this is for the KTT Latex mattress upgrade). We bought the 300TC sheets but they also have 500 if that floats your boat. We also bought a few sets of sheets from two different sellers on Amazon as backups and for our son's bed on the side dinette. They were allegedly 300TC Egyptian cotton but after washing just once (and dried on delicate) they were very rough feeling. ■ Plates. We found Corelle knock-offs called Oftast at Ikea. These don't shatter into a billion little shards like Corelle but are still tempered glass so you can use them in the microwave unlike melamine or acrylic. They're also super cheap: less than $1 each. We switched our 4-year-old to these dishes after we discovered them in February and none have broken yet, other than the two I broke for testing purposes. I also want to thank Reed and Karen Lukens for compiling their Amazon Wish List. We didn't buy close to everything on the list, and sometimes we bought different items than what they recommended, but it was a great resource to see things we might have forgotten or not thought about.

Interesting. When I tried the Google method that David outlined last year there were few to no results from the Forum section, as if Oliver had blocked Google from indexing the forum. It's good to see that has changed now.

Has anybody looked into the MORryde suspension options? They basically add dampened vertical travel to the equalizer. http://www.morryde.com/product-category/4-suspension?filter%5B%5D=all&filter%5B%5D=8

You can go to page 2 of this thread to see Oliver's attempt and associated discussion: http://olivertraveltrailers.com/topic/spring-over-axle-lift/page/2/

"Ribbed anchors" are what those do-hickies are called. Brilliant! Sometimes less is more.

I'm in for at least a t-shirt or polo shirt.

Posting this again for ease of reference: https://www.michelintruck.com/reference-materials/manuals-bulletins-and-warranties/load-and-inflation-tables/#/ Ollie's tires are in the second table (LT225/75R16). The weight ratings listed are per axle, and "single" vs "dual" means how many tires at each end of the axle. So basically just read the top row of the second table. I assume that Overland's comment: "This last trip was at 45 per Michelin’s recommendations" is based on following the above table for 7000 lb GVWR divided among two axles (3500 each) resulting in 45 PSI being the minimum pressure needed to safely carry that weight.

So it sounds like our choices are to either switch the hubs and wheels to 5 bolt and keep the 3500 lb axles or get heavier axles and keep the wheels. I like the latter for simplicity but Overland makes a good point about unsprung weight.

It worked now. Thank you!

I'm trying to respond to a PM right now but whenever I click the Send Message button it just scrolls me up to the top of the page. The Send Message button appears to be a lighter / greyed-out gold color as opposed to the normal gold trim color that other forum functions appear to be. I've tried multiple browsers with the same results. What am I doing wrong?

Hi Kim, your replies are visible to all, so thank you. (If you want to speak directly to one person and not have the entire Interwebz see it, you can send them a private message by clicking on their name and then on the "Message" button on the right side of the screen) Our pickup day is a week from tomorrow. We placed our order at the beginning of January* and we've been in the "try to be patient" mode for so long that we haven't broken out of that yet...it's almost surreal. This weekend it finally occurred to us that we need to start packing/organizing all that guest room stuff. * We could have chosen an earlier pickup date but my better half is a teacher and we had to wait for her summer break to start.

Welcome! I'm also curious about your thoughts as an almost-Airstream owner. We never considered Airstream mostly due to the aluminum (we get hail here) but also cost and not enough ground clearance. I laughed about the guest room comment. Ours is in the same condition!

Thanks for all the great info. I have some reading / watching to do. I wasn't planning on returning to Hohenwald after I pick up my trailer for various reasons, but if they start offering a disc brake upgrade I may just have to.

OK you got me. I don't know jack about drum brakes, let alone electric drum brakes. Do you know of any good resources online where I can learn this material? Electrical troubleshooting I can figure out but I'm concerned about John's findings, and that I have no idea what he's talking about with regard to what he did. Yeah I can "just Google it" but when you don't know what you don't know, it's difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. I would greatly appreciate any tips or links to quality resources.

Has the factory fixed the design issues that lead to this problem or do newer trailers still have this problem?

Oh, I didn't know there was another section of track by the door. We weren't planning on using that. Does the door keep the water contained in the bathroom? If so I don't see why one would need a curtain there.

Hi Don, do the levelers need to be trimmed at all to fit between the wheels? I just received mine and if they need trimming I'd prefer to do that from the comfort of home.

That's disappointing. We ordered that shower curtain track and are in the process of shopping for a curtain now. Prior to ordering we waffled back and forth on whether to buy it. In the end we thought the factory solution was cleaner than a straight bar and we could easily choose to not use it. Maybe a snap at the top of the uphill side would hold it in position when desired. Or a thin hook (aside: I recently discovered 3M makes Command strips for bathrooms / wet environments) could be used to grab the first hole on the shower curtain.

Something new I just noticed...when I posted the phrase travel trailers an automatic hyperlink was added to olivertraveltrailers . com/travel-trailers/. I'm not sure how I feel about this. On other forums, I've seen where acronyms or jargon will get an automatic tool tip (dotted underline and when you mouse over it, a text description pops up to explain what the acronym/phrase means). But in this case it appears that I am linking to the Oliver Travel Trailers product page, which is not what I intended. In context I was talking about "other travel trailers," as in other than Olivers, so it didn't make sense in that specific case. But more broadly I don't think the forum should be modifying someone's post with content that they did not intend, since even a hyperlink implies that the linked page is part of what the author is trying to say.