2022 Grand Design Solitude 380FL, sealed bid, Houston lender yard to Prescott

the price is not the interesting part of this post. a 6 foot 4 bed and a 41 foot front living trailer is the interesting part.

what does the 380FL sticker say for hitch weight, and what does the yellow sticker in your driver door jamb say for payload? those two numbers decide whether this was a good week or an expensive one, and i ask because front living floorplans put the heavy end over the pin.

also, what is in the bed right now. if the trailer came with nothing and you are still shopping for a hitch, say so before you buy one, because on a 6 foot 4 bed there is one right answer and three wrong ones.

6 foot 4 and a 41 footer is a pullrite superglide conversation and i will die on this hill.

here is why. the kingpin sits roughly over the rear axle, which on a short bed crew cab puts it about 42 inches off the back of the cab. the front cap of a 380FL is wide and its corner swings on a radius well past that, so somewhere around 70 degrees of turn the trailer is touching your cab. a fixed hitch on a short bed means you back into every site at a shallow angle or you buy new rear glass. the superglide slides itself as you turn, off the kingpin, and it is the only one of these that still works on the day you forget. you will forget.

what is the pin weight. everything after that depends on it.

answers in order, and the pin weight is going to start a fight so i am putting it last.

the bid. blind and sealed. nobody else's figure is ever shown to you, there is no second round, and raising your own is allowed right up to the close. i put 41,000 on a 2021 reflection 311BHS in may and lost it, and to this day i do not know by how much. five hundred dollars, maybe. you either make peace with that or you stay out of it.

comps in june on a 2022 380FL: 71,900 at a dealer in phoenix, 68,500 at one in surprise, a private sale in tucson at 63,000 that turned out to be a 2023 with a different floorplan. i bid 54,500 and won it on the 16th. no buyer's premium on an m&a lot, so the invoice read 54,500 flat and then one delivery line under it.

delivery. free for the first 1,000 road miles and 70 cents a mile after that. their sheet put the yard to my gate at 1,412 miles, so 412 miles at 70 cents, 288.40. i wired on the 17th. a transport driver out of abilene named marcus pulled it with his own f-450. he phoned when he hooked up, phoned again from las cruces, and phoned once more when he was an hour out. it sat in my driveway on the 30th, thirteen days after the wire.

paper. what arrived was the texas title with the lender's assignment filled out and a lien release stamped across the face, and one sheet from the broker out of independence naming the bank as the seller. the m&a people were straight about that part on the first phone call. they do not own these trailers, the lender does, and the lien gets cleared before anything changes hands. yavapai county took twenty minutes. arizona title and a year of registration came to 1,042 with the VLT, and then arizona wanted 5.6 percent use tax on an out of state purchase, which is 3,052, which i knew was coming and still sat in the truck for a minute over.

weights. trailer sticker reads 13,845 dry, 16,800 GVWR, 2,795 dry hitch. scaled loaded at the cat scale in prescott valley with half a tank of fresh: 15,980 gross, 3,280 on the pin. my door sticker says 3,460 payload. add a hitch, the two of us, two dogs and what is in the back seat and i am about 240 pounds over. so no, i did not do this in the right order, and ted already knows it.

congratulations, and now go read your date codes before you tow it anywhere.

a 2022 solitude left the factory on goodyear endurance ST235/80R16 load range E. four of those carry 3,520 apiece, so 14,080 under a trailer rated at 16,800. grand design puts the same tire under a 10,000 pound trailer and a 16,800 pound trailer and calls it even. yours has been sitting on gravel in houston sun for who knows how many months with no weight moving around inside them, and flat spotting plus uv is harder on a trailer tire than miles are.

read the last four of the DOT number on all four. if they come back 21 or 22 you are on borrowed time whatever the tread looks like. mine came apart at four years with tread left and took the skirt with it, that thread is here: ST tire let go at 62 on I-20.

and your 240 over problem gets a little smaller if you stop hauling 60 gallons of fresh water around arizona.

going to say the unpopular thing to the hitch crowd. prescott is 240 pounds over on the truck. a pullrite superglide is right at 200 pounds in the bed with the capture plate. an andersen ultimate is 35.

i have pulled a 16,800 pound pinnacle 40,000 miles behind an andersen, one hand to hook it, and it is the quietest hitch i have owned because there is no steel on steel anywhere in it. on a short bed you run the offset version and you watch your mirrors, which is the same thing you do with a slider you forgot to pull.

165 pounds of payload is not a rounding error when you are already over. that is the whole argument and i will let ted have the floor.

i am not bolting an aluminum funnel under 16,800 pounds of front living trailer and telling a man it is fine, so we are going to disagree on that one.

a b&w companion is 105 pounds for the head and 65 for the base, it comes out of the bed in two pieces in four minutes, and the slider version is manual, which is the honest complaint against it. you stop and you pull the handle before a tight turn. i have rebuilt four pin boxes this year for people who did not, and that job starts at 900 dollars.

prescott, while you are deciding: pull the carpet back in the front storage and look at the four bolts holding the pin box to the frame rails. anything that has sat on a lender yard, and plenty of trailers straight off the line, come with those at whatever torque the fellow on the line felt like that morning. they are half inch grade 8 and they want 110 foot pounds. check them now and check them again after your first long trip. i see more damage from those four bolts than from any brand argument anybody is going to have in this thread.

that is five posts of superglide against companion against andersen inside a thread about what a man paid for a trailer. it is a good argument. it is not this argument, so it has its own thread now and the three of you can go finish it over there.

ted, your pin box bolt post stayed, because that is about prescott's trailer and he needs it. tyler, the tire post stayed for the same reason.

prescott, you still owe us the fault list. everybody who finds this thread in two years wants to know what was wrong with it when it came off the truck.

fair. here is everything that was wrong with it, including the part i would rather not type.

mice. there had been a nest in the left front basement compartment, in the corner behind the water manifold. droppings, insulation pulled apart, and they had chewed a plastic clip off a pex line and the corner of the bedroom slide seal. nothing was leaking, but it was close. two evenings with a shop vac, steel wool stuffed in every hole i could find and four traps, 18 dollars at the hardware store on gurley street. the seal corner i glued and it has held since.

kitchen slide topper had a four inch tear about a foot in from the end. you cannot see that in a photograph because the topper is rolled up when the slide is in, and every listing photo had the slides in. nobody's fault. a tear aid type b patch, 24 dollars, still fine four months later.

rear jack had no foot pad on it. 31 dollars.

i did not file anything. the 30 day money back with m&a auto sales is for a lot being materially misrepresented, and a mouse nest in a three year old repo is not that. the listing said what it said: one owner, bank repo, roof and seals photographed, nothing at all about the inside being detailed, and the basement photos were of an empty compartment with the light on, which it was. you learn to read what is not in the pictures. 73 dollars of problems on a 54,500 trailer is a result i will take.

this is the thread that is going to make me do it, so two questions about the parts nobody puts in the writeups.

the six month warranty on a repo trailer, is that a real thing or is it a sticker? there is no engine on a trailer, so what would it even cover. and the 30 day window you mentioned, has anybody on here actually used one.

the warranty came in the packet with the title paperwork. six months limited, and i read the whole thing at the kitchen table because i assumed the same as you.

on a vehicle it is six months or 10,000 miles. a trailer has no odometer so it is just the six months, and it covers systems: water heater, fridge, converter, slide motors, axles and brakes. it does not cover the topper i tore, cosmetics, or a mouse. i called to ask specifically whether a slide motor would be covered if it quit, because that is a 700 dollar part on this trailer, and the answer came back two days later by email as yes with the claim steps attached. two days is slow when you are standing in your driveway wondering. i have not had to use it and it runs out at the end of december.

the 30 day money back is for a lot being materially misrepresented, which the m&a people explained on the phone as a bent frame, a different model showing up, a title that will not transfer. if the 380FL had come off marcus's truck with a cracked front cap under a wrap of shrink film i would have been on the phone that afternoon. for what actually happened, no. and i would rather they keep that bar where it is than have it pay for everybody else's mouse.

one thing i would say to anybody dealing with M and A or any other broker: ask for the photo you want before you bid, and then wait for it. i asked and i got it. the three days bothered me more than it should have.

did almost exactly this in june with a 2021 montana 3761FL out of a yard north of indianapolis. mine came in at 912 road miles on the m&a sheet, so the delivery line was a zero. the whole writeup with the florida title mess is over here rather than piled on top of prescott's: 2021 Montana 3761FL, Indiana yard to Gainesville.

one thing i would add to his post. he asked for roof seam photos before he bid and i did not, and i am the one who found failed sealant above the ladder bracket in week one. same process, different amount of homework.

UPDATE, first real trip, and ted gets to say he told me so.

out from the 3rd of october to the 11th. prescott to kanab, kanab to torrey, back down the long way, 980 miles round trip and the first time this trailer has been more than 60 miles from the pad.

day two, about fifteen miles north of fredonia on 89A, one loud bang. nothing in the mirror, no sway, trailer tracking straight. then for the next twenty minutes every expansion joint came through the truck as a hard chuck that had not been there the day before. pulled into the chevron at kanab and crawled under the front.

two of the four bolts holding the pin box to the frame rails were gone. the other two were finger loose. post 7 in this thread, word for word, four months earlier.

napa in kanab had half inch grade 8 bolts, nylock nuts and flat washers, 14.80 for eight. i had a 3/4 socket and a torque wrench in the toolbox. forty minutes in their parking lot, 110 foot pounds, and the chuck was gone for the other 700 miles. re-torqued at home and nothing had moved. ted, i owe you a beer in quartzsite.

so here is where it lands four months in. 54,500, plus 288.40 of delivery, plus 4,094 to the state of arizona for title, plate and use tax. 73 dollars of mice and topper and jack pad. 14.80 of bolts that should have been checked before i ever hooked up, by me. the trailer is what the photos said it was, the title came through clean, and marcus did not scratch it.

the part i got wrong has nothing to do with mandaautollc.com. i bought a 41 foot trailer to go behind a truck i already owned instead of the other way around, and i am 240 pounds over on paper because of it. i am watching the m&a listings for a used 3500 dually now, which my wife finds very funny.