As I’ve blogged about before, I’m a stickler for knowing where I’m at with my truck and camper weights. I have weighed my rig multiple times at CAT Scales and have even compared the advertised dry weights to my actual dry weights. I’ve even gone so far as creating TowingPlanner.com to allow people to do their own weights and the site “crunches” the numbers for them.

I typically just stop at a truck stop and am weighed at what is called a CAT Scale. This is what big rigs do to verify that they are road legal. There are 3 scales and you get weights for your truck’s steering axle (aka front wheels), it’s drive axle (aka rear wheels), and then the camper’s axles combined. This is good because you can verify overall numbers, but it can be better.

Most RVs aren’t perfectly balanced. If you have 2 or 3 axles, you’ll find that one side carries more than another or the front carries more than the rear. You can’t easily tell this at CAT scales without some fancy footwork which may or may not be possible or even against the scale’s rules. To find this out, you need to have a set of scales that can be placed under each wheel and get individual weights.

There are a few providers of weightings like this. The challenge is that these locations usually aren’t convenient to wherever I happen to be. But, I found that Escapees SmartWeigh has a location that was about an hour away from the Thousand Trails Orlando campground. Even better, my membership to Fulltime Families also got me 1 year free included in Escapees. Winning!

The website reported that they only do weightings on M-F and limited hours. Fortunately, Al (the scalemaster) told me it was no problem to do a weighing on a Sunday outside of the established hours. Woohoo!

By the end of the weighing, you get a sheet of paper that tells you individual weights for each wheel location for both the truck and RV. It also records those weights against what your manufacturer’s ratings are. This helps you to know if you are under, at, or over any specific ratings.

We pulled up to the campground and the scalemaster got me arranged on the pad, lined up the scales, and recorded each weight. He would zero out the scale, have me pull on top of it, and then have me move onto the next position. All told, it didn’t take all that long to do.

Sadly, I had to be the bad guy and throw my mother-in-law out of the truck for the weightings. They want your vehicle as close to how you normally travel as possible.

By the end of it, they gave me a rather comprehensive form filled with my weights.

The longest story shortest, I’m withing all ratings on my truck and over on my “total” weight of the camper. I have one tire that’s over its rating on the camper, but all others are at or under (which, I’m realizing as I write this now- that’s not something that this form specifically called out- I had to go to my tire manufacturer’s web page for that information; specifically the max load for the tire in my size)

Here are my numbers:

The one rating that I’m most bothered by is being right at (and even over on one) my tire maximum loading capacity. Tire damage is bad. Wrecks caused by a blowout is worse. To combat that, I’m already running a tire pressure monitoring system on most of my tires.