I was just wondering if anybody has modded a tent trailer to haul a quad on top of it and if so what was all invovled to beef it up. Pics would be great if anyone has them.

I have one, stripped to haul four bikes. But I'm guessing you still want to be able to use it to sleep in too?

If so, there have been several, but the best ones are designed to haul toys while still being a tent camper. I wouldn't think sticking anything heavier than a cooler on a normal tent trailer lid would turn out too well.

If you have ever looked at a tent trailer the roofs are not that strong and are made as light as possible for the lifting mechanism to lift the roof. You might get a few coolers on the top but thats it. Unless you are thinking of striping it down to use as a bike hauler then they work great for that. Another thing to consider is the wieght rating on the tires, fully functional loaded trailer and bikes would way over load the little tires. There it a tent trailer with a loading plateform built into the front of it but they use 30inch BFG's which is a higher load rating. If you do put some quads on top of a tent trailer post some pics as it would be interesting to see. :ride:

I would think if you were to do this you'd want to place a good size sheet of ply wood or ? down to help distribute the weight across the top. Like they said before the tops aren't that heavy duty and may cave-in at the tires. Tying it down is another story...

medhatken said:

Don't do it and save yourself and the tent trailer some pain and greif.

It has bad idea written all over it.

I looked into building some sort of rack that tied into the frame on mine at one time. The short version is that it just isn't going to happen. The frames on them are not strong enough and the roof is nowhere near strong enough.

I have seen a few redneck jobs where they put the tent trailer on a flatbed that had room for bikes. Saw a really good job once where they built a trailer around the box of the tent trailer and left room for bikes on the front. Really nice but tons of $$ if you can't do it yourself.

The Coleman models have fully boxed frames, instead of C-channel, so I doubt the frame would have any trouble. Also, the newer model trailers are designed to have roof racks or roof-mounted AC units installed. The manufacturers will state what the roof is rated to hold. I have seen some rated as high as 600lbs, but would personally avoid anything that heavy. Weight distribution (and center-of-gravity) is important for all trailers, but even more so when stacking anything heavy on top of a box thats already 4ft off the ground. If supported properly on a newer model, I would think that it could handle a minibike or miniquad.

Fleetwood makes a few pop-up trailers that can carry bikes. the Scorpion is built on a heavy duty steel trailer that could carry construction equipment. There are other Fleetwood trailers that have deck areas that could probably carry 3 dirtbikes.

Found this one listed under the sticky at the top of this forum, not that fancy, but I believe it would work for what you have described.

http://www.jumpingjacktrailers.com/

medhatken said:

IDK if I'd be comfortable putting a quad on the roof of a tent trailer....

kenr74 said:

I've given some thought to removing the undercarriage from a tent trailer and putting the whole works on top of a tandem axle 4 place snomobile trailer-they're the right width, a bit high (easily solved with a set of steps) and a 4 place would leave plenty of room to haul 2 atv's or 4 bikes if the tent trailer was placed in the center of the trailer.

I'm still doing some research, and pretty sure that the when the tent is open, it would pretty much cover the entire bed of the trailer.....you'd just have to fab some jacks/stabilizers from the sled trailer frame or it'd get very wiggly should someone start tossing and turning at night.

if you're taking stuff off a tent trailer, you should have the steps and outrigger looking things on hand. I cut the ones off ours cause they got in the way of my stow-under ramp, but I plan to weld them back on in a convenient place later. Makes it nice for loading bikes without hooking up to a vehicle to keep the nose on the ground.