Has anyone ever been rearended?

[Kevin K]

Should I move my spare tire from the back of my 13' Scamp trailer to under the front of the trailer. If someone hits me in the back, the tire will go into the fiberglass and crack it for sure. If I take the tire off they will hit the bumper first . Anybody ever have someone hit your trailer in the rear?

[Bill K]

Kevin,
I think like you, I am about to order a Scamp 16 and will have them leave off the stud's for the spare tire.

Bill K

Should I move my spare tire from the back of my 13' Scamp trailer to under the front of the trailer. If someone hits me in the back, the tire will go into the fiberglass and crack it for sure. If I take the tire off they will hit the bumper first . Anybody ever have someone hit your trailer in the rear?

[Dan Meyer]

The bumper on my Scamp 16 is just a little L channel; I can't imagine it would take much to crumple it. I'd rather have the spare tire spread the force of a small impact over a large area. For larger impacts, my insurance company is going to be involved anyway...

-- Dan Meyer

[Ken C]

[Kevin K]

Ken C
If I may ask.
How much to fix your trailer.

[The Hobo]

Ken C
If I may ask.
How much to fix your trailer.

Or to fix the broken nose of the guy who was following too close.!!???

[Christi V.]

yes and it scared the bee-gees outta me.. it wasn't a direct hi as i wasd making a left hand turn and this kid decided to pass me !!! ( of course he wasnt paying attention) I actually had the spare tire off and the X-pens bolted to the tire rods .. so they did hit me at an angle... Damage done was one of the breaklights and 2 of the spare tire rods.. so I was pretty lucky as far as that goes..
I had a shop fix mine, but its been awhile back and I dont exactually remember.. maybe around $500..... The kid sent me a check for the repairs.. No fiberglass damage.. so that was good.

Still to this day I am really paranoid about people following to close and hope they are also paying attention to my signal lights!!!

Kevin C.. ouch!! A car body shop should be able to fix that .. hopefully a reasonable price!

[Ken C]

ohh, that's just an old casita fourms photo. I cant find the post but others may remember the owner just bought the trailer and i think it was rear ended as it left the factory.

ON a side note, anyone have a photo of that casita frame that bent. The front of the frame. The propane bottles got scrunched up into front of the fiberglass shell?

[Tom Trostel]

If you are bumped or back into a tree truck, then the lack of a spare tire might save some grief. Any harder hit will do too much damage for the spare to make a difference. Ten years ago we were rear-ended on a Dallas freeway while towing a 16' Casita. We were stopped due to construction and hit by a plumbing company F-250 towing a trenching machine. I estimate it was slowed to about 40 mph when it skidded into us. Afterwards, the Casita looked much better than our car. The tongue pushed the hitch through the trunk and almost to the back seat. Our tow vehicle, a Nissan Maxima, suffered $12,000 damage and was repaired by insurance. The Casita, which was rented from the US Navy, was totalled. The trailer may have saved our lives by deflecting several bundles of 1" PVC pipe that were on top of the truck and ended up 50 yards down the highway. Good insurance is much more important than were the spare tire is located.

[Pete Dumbleton]

Don't overlook the fact that one really good thing about fiberglass is it is very flexible when it comes to rebuilding -- Unlike the metal in the tow vehicle or sheets of stuf in a stickie RV.

Also, I would prefer that someone crack my egg than bend the frame.

A lot would depend on what hit you in terms of how high or low the front end of the other vehicle is.

[Roger H]

The only positive about putting the spare in the hitch frame triangle in the front is that it adds hitch weight rather than unloading it by leveraging the back of the trailer. In any substantial impact, it isn't going to make one whit of difference whether or not your spare is on the back. If you get rear-ended, you get rear-ended, and the bumper on most of these trailers isn't going to save anything either with or without a spare. The bumper is merely a light-weight structural cross-member that holds the backs of the frame rails together and provides a secure mounting point for the stabilizer jacks.

Roger

[Pete Dumbleton]

Amen, Brother! But what I had in mind was more of a glancing blow rather than a full-speed 'fell asleep at the wheel' kind of crash.

BTW, interesting how different parts of the country use different terms, sometime with different meanings for the same word. Growing up in Northeastern New Jersey, we would call it an "accident", but in Georgia, it's a "wreck" (In my part of NJ, wrecked meant destroyed, so an accident could result in a total wreck)

[Roger H]

In any event, a four-thousand-plus pound vehicle hitting a 1/4" fiberglass shell at any speed and any direction is going to severely damage the trailer regardless of whether or not it has a spare tire attached. The difference is that the energy transmitted in a "glancing blow" may be low enough that the trailer may be able to be repaired after the collision. A five mile an hour crash with a four-thousand pound vehicle transmits huge force vector loads on anything it hits. Remember what the old "five mph" bumpers looked like in the '70s? It is possible to drive a car into and break a reinforced concrete block wall at 5mph.

Roger