• Hi Guest!
    If you appreciate British Car Forum and our 25 years of supporting British car enthusiasts with technical and anicdotal information, collected from our thousands of great members, please support us with a low-cost subscription. You can become a supporting member for less than the dues of most car clubs.
    There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Subscribers don't see this gawd-aweful banner
Tips
Tips

TR6 Help w/ toe dolly TR6

Share this page

V

vettedog72

Jedi Knight
Offline
I had an awful experience with a UHaul toe dolly about 4 years ago. The stock TR6 just did not "fit" front ways or back ways. The Triumph frame would foul on the top of the ramp. Since then I have read that some members had been successful with the dolly. I wound up using the auto hauler. Any advice about how to use the dolly is appreciated.
 
If your car has overdrive you might want to check with John at Quantum Mechanics.

He recommends that you do not tow an 'A' type overdrive car. He says towing these cars will seriously overheat the unit. There were some posts about this earlier.

Pete
 
Even without OD, you should disconnect the driveshaft if you are going very far or fast. The gearbox relies on splash lubrication from the countershaft, but the countershaft doesn't turn with the engine stopped.

Another downside to using a tow dolly over long distances is that it's hard to tell what's going on back there. This is what happened the last time I used one:

shreddedtire.jpg


(We had to move the shredded tire to the front, in order to put a good tire on the rear to get home.)
 
I've towed TR7s long distances with the tow dolley. Can be tricky, if the hitch is low to the ground the towed vehicle will hang up getting loaded and the ramps can be a bear to get slid back into the dolley. U-haul makes running changes to their equipment so what I rented a few years back may not be the same. The auto transport is comparatively heavy and can be a load by itself. I peeled a tread outside of Hays, KS and beat up the side of one 7 before I got stopped. Make sure the rear tires are good for it if towing with the dolley. I wouldn't recommend towing one backwards on the dolley. Lastly, backing up with the loaded dolley is akin to herding cats. Backing the loaded auto transport is doable.
 
I agree - I rented a trailer from Uhaul
& it weighed about 2000 pounds.I was towing
with an Arrowstar minivan & definately knew
it was back there.
Also,the down side of a tow dolly is that
besides a tire failure,what if you have a bad
wheel bearing on the towed vehicle?

- Doug
 
Dale said:
I wouldn't recommend towing one backwards on the dolley.
Click to expand...
:iagree:

At the insistence of my co-driver, we tried that with the Sports 6 pictured above. It worked fine up to exactly 52 mph, and then suddenly started swaying wildly. It's fortunate I was on a deserted two lane road at the time, as I was using all of it! Being somewhat stubborn, I repeated the experiment one more time (discovering that it would sometimes sway at 49 mph); then stopped to swap ends and disconnect the driveshaft.

Yes, I had the steering wheel tied down, and the steering mechanism was functional.

While my tow vehicle may have been a bit dodgy, I had no trouble at all up to 70 mph or so with the S6 on frontwards. In fact, I got a warning for speeding not long after crossing the California line (vehicles with trailers are limited to 55 mph in CA).
 
Glad I stumbled on this thread. I gotta dolly my brothers TR6 with overdrive about 30 miles. I'll be disconnecting the drive shaft before that little trip. I hadn't really given that a thought.
As for the ramps, you can play with the clearance by using different "drop" lengths for your hitch, or even turning them upside down to raise the tongue height.. Surprisingly, Wal Mart has a decent selection of Reese hitches in their automotive dept. and you can probably get what you need for under $30.
 
Banjo said:
Glad I stumbled on this thread. I gotta dolly my brothers TR6 with overdrive about 30 miles. I'll be disconnecting the drive shaft before that little trip. I hadn't really given that a thought.
As for the ramps, you can play with the clearance by using different "drop" lengths for your hitch, or even turning them upside down to raise the tongue height.. Surprisingly, Wal Mart has a decent selection of Reese hitches in their automotive dept. and you can probably get what you need for under $30.
Click to expand...

Hey Ben,
When you get it down here or need any help give me a call.
 
tdskip said:
UHaul auto transport is the only way to do this properly, cheap compared to everything that can go wrong.
Click to expand...

i'd agree with this. whatever you decide to do, if you are renting from uhaul, just make sure you give there stuff a really good look over.
 
Also be warned that they may get picky about your tow vehicle. I rented one of their car carriers to haul my Sports 6 to it's new owner, and when we went to hook it up, the "technician" at UH tried to claim that my station wagon wasn't big enough.

After a somewhat heated exchange, including my producing the owner's manual to prove how much the car weighs and what it's rated to tow, he had me sign a waiver and let me take the trailer.

At the other end, they were closing early and refused to accept the trailer even though I got there at 4:45. I wound up just leaving it on the lot and daring them to claim I hadn't.

Oh yeah, +1 on the UH car hauler being WAY heavy for towing a Triumph.
 
I wound up using the UHAUL Auto Transporter. It worked fine except for the back up maneuver required to get the contraption through one of those decorative wrought iron gates at 2705 Magazine Street in New Orleans. I had to back completely across Magazine Street, which was under construction. If a driveway across the street had not been nearly aligned with the gate I think I would have abandoned the whole idea and left the money on the table. All I could think of was G. Clooney's line out of Oh Brother: "This is a tight spot!"
 
"Boys, we're in a tight spot!"

Pictures?!?!? You 'gotta document the new car picture process especially if there is a road trip involved.
 
No pictures, except in my mind. I hauled the worse one (may be the best one who knows)over to a friends house in Louisiana to hold until I get some space to place it near home (Atlanta area). It will not be such a "tight spot" when I pull the last one to GA. My bud in Louisiana has a trailer and I may get him to put it on that trailer (along with his Harley) to bring both up to GA for a Harley ride in the mountains.
 
Back
Top