The SAFE & EASY way to load motorcycles into a toyhauler - Full Time RV Living

Hi, I'm Janice and I'm Dave and we're living in No Fixed Address. Today we're going to show you how we get those... ...in there. So, I'm sure some of you are thinking well it's obvious you just drive the bikes up this ramp and in and you're done. But more often than not that's more easily said than done Quite often the ramp as it is right now is wet from dew and you have very little traction on the ramp in that situation. And also, the two bikes are fairly wide and to get both of them in here there's not very much clearance between the side of the bike and the doorframe and obviously we don't want to damage either the bike or the trailer when loading them. And the lack of traction usually means when I drive them in I have to take a run at it So it's kind of chaotic at times when you are racing this bike up this ramp as quickly as you can, not hitting the door frame, not hitting the other bike that might already be in here, and stopping at the right spot when I get in there. So we're going to show you how we do it now to avoid all of that. So it occurred to us at some point why don't we use a winch and pull the bikes in instead of driving them in? So we went online and we found this little portable winch made by Warn 115 volts. Plugs into the wall. It's got a 15-foot cable on it. I think it's got a thousand pound capacity. So that's plenty for pulling a bike up the ramp. We went to Lowe's or Home Depot or something and bought some cables and hooks to make this little bridle system here. And on the other end we've got rope and we'll show you how we use all of this now. I take care of doing all the rigging on the inside of the trailer and Dave takes care of actually driving the bikes in. So it's a pretty simple process. We just have to hook the cables up to the d-rings that are attached to the trailer I should mention that before we start anything we put all of our straps in the rough location of where we're going to need them to be so we're not scrambling all over the place trying to find them once we've got the bikes loaded in the trailer. The next step will be extending the cable. We just connect these on like this and leave them sticking forward so they don't get caught as we drive the bike up to the ramp These will be ready for the winch lines to hook onto once we get to the ramp. Now we're ready do the second bike so Janice will get the winch ready again. And extend the cable again. We just bought a little short six foot extension cord to use on this winch because it only comes with about a foot of cord on it. Kind of useless that way. But the 6 foot cord works really well because there's outlets on both sides in here and that's about as far as we need to go and keeps it short enough it's not getting tangled in stuff. So I just leave those splayed out like that so that they're not in the way when I bring the bike up between them. You may not be able to see that very well on the camera but the last little bit of cable on this is painted red and that's to indicate you don't want to spool the cable out any further than that, which gives us about 15 feet exposed cable right now. One of the things we really wish the winch had was the ability to "free spool". In other words be able to extend the cable without having to run the motor to do that. I mean, this is fine. It just takes a little longer to extend the cable, but it would be nice if we could just pull the cable out in a free spool mode. So Janice will get the next wheel chock ready, put in place once the bike's up in here. Once she's got that set aside but handy we'll be able to bring the next bike in. One of the nice things about these Condor wheel chocks is as you see we've driven the bike into it and it's just being held there now. You don't need to worry about it falling over while we strap it down Janice generally it takes care of the front end of the bike, getting the straps hooked in. And I take care of the back. You'll notice that we have to double up straps on some of the d-rings. We try not to do that though with the two bikes. Each of those is on their own d-rings. The smoker is hooked down to some of the same ones as the first bike but it's not putting a huge load on the d-ring like the bike fastenings are. So we just loosely put those in first while we wait to get the back hooked up. On the back we use these... ...I don't know what you call them...self extending ratchet straps, which are really nice. You don't have a big long piece of strap getting in the way. You just take out whatever you need Okay, so now that the back is tightened in we can put the final tension on these guys and lock the bike in. And that's it! We're loaded. Ready to hit the road. Little pro tip. We use our mats that we normally keep at the bottom of the stairs under the edge of the trailer just to protect it from the gravel and dirt and other things that can scratch up our paint job. Sometimes the ground is not level where the ramp meets it and in that case, we will roll one of the mats up to take up space so that we're not putting a twist on the ramp. So that's all there is to it Yeah, it's taken all of the stress out of our loading day. It used to be quite hectic and worrisome getting the bikes in and this has made it so much easier. We have a list of all the major components in the description below And you'll note that the cost of this approach is not insignificant. The biggest cost of course is the price of the winch itself. but we look at it as being cheap insurance for what we feel would have been an inevitable accident. And we want to say thanks for watching and please consider subscribing, Giving us a thumbs up and hit that little bell symbol down below to get notifications each time we release a new video. We'll see you next time.

Channel: NoFixedAddress

Views: 66,910

Keywords: safe & easy way to load motorcycles into a toyhauler, load motorcycles, toyhauler, easy way to load motorcycles, safe way to load motorcycles, easy, safe, load, motorcycles, winch, safe & easy way to load motorcycles inot a toyhauler, toy hauler, how to, harley davidson, wheel chocks, harley davidson street glide, wheel chocks for rv, wheel chocks motorcycle, wheel chocks for motorcycle trailers, toy hauler living, toy hauler hacks, how to load 2 motorcycles in a truck

Id: GRd4XJoS8No

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 14 2020