[Loneoak]

We took a trailer seminar at Lazy Days in Tampa last year. The instructor had some hints for driving the rig, and also a method of parking it using dots on the unit for reference points. One of the things he he said that if you are making a left hand turn, when your hip (that is the driver's hip) crosses the line you want to stay to the right of, then you can turn your steering wheel to the left. Until then, you drive straight. I hope this makes sense.

Lazy Days does offer the Class A lessons. Since we pull a 5er, we arranged to meet the instructor for some one on one. The method he uses for backing in uses more road width than we normally have available. I devised a method of backing into a site (or driveway) where you use minimum roadway. You basically jack knife it in. First you have to determine how far past the edge of the driveway the back end of your trailer needs to be (with our previous trailer this was about 20 feet) before you crank the steering wheel and back it in. You start out parallel to and about 3 feet from the edge of the road.

The way to figure out your distance is to take it to a big empty parking lot, mark your starting point, back it into an imaginary site, and measure the distance between where the back of your trailer was at the start and where the edge of the imaginary driveway is. If you back in at home, then position your truck and trailer to start, then find a reference point for next time.

The instructor did give us one very important tip which I had a bit of trouble getting my head around at first, but eventually I go it. If your trailer is in a good position, but your truck is not (as in at an angle to your trailer), then any movement of your truck is going to screw up your trailer position. What you do about that it go backwards or forward, steering hard to get the truck straight while moving your trailer only a minimum amount, like maybe a couple of inches. It works.

The instructor did this all for free (we were out about an hour and a half) but of course we gave him some money.