Stan...Wrenn....Danny........Thanks for your opinions. Useful too ! Pulling my Skipjack boat. (9640 lbs). I had less than 10% on the hitch of a GMC 3500. 780 lbs was ideal to me. I had to move the boat around to get it just right.
When you have a boat in salt water, brakes become useless in a very short time. I soon became an expert in my trailer brake maintenance ! Current boat is a Mexican Panga with twin Yamaha's. Boat and trailer weigh in at 3365lbs. Current boat trailer has two axles but no brakes and no more brake maintenance ! I tow it a lot to different places along the Baja Peninsula which sometimes, is pretty far. My current truck is a GMC Canyon all Terrain with a V-6 and does pretty good but any bigger boat would dramatically change things.
The "T" trailer attracts me for its simple design. I used one when I was in my Dune Buggy phase of happiness in life and was always impressed with it. The biggest problem is getting everything low enough (or long enough) to simply drive the Spyder on without bottoming out anywhere. Once on it's pretty stabile. looking at Danny's trailer, it may be necessary to move the "wheel cups" to the rear of the trailer wheels to take some weight off the tongue hitch. Or extend the tongue further forward. Without calculating yet, I'm thinking of trying to move the wheel cups to the rear. This would allow a couple things. Smooth out and extend the center lift/ramp tube to lower and lengthen the Spyder's approach angle up onto the trailer. Once partially up on the trailer it would reduce how low the rear end of the Spyder had to dip and hopefully not drag on the pavement.
I could make the center rail dip down somewhere about midway between the hitch and the trailer wheels at about the time the rear end of the Spyder starts to drag. The problem with this is that tube may then start to hit the underside of the Spyder's belly pan once the Spyder is loaded. My little scale model is showing me all kinds of little things like that. The problem is the Spyder is very low with very low approach angles.
Wrenn. Thanks for the offer of some engineering help.
Robert....I hadn't thought about your idea of making a sliding "T" for the frt wheels. It might eliminate having to need two tubes for the center frame up to the hitch. just one square one ? Love this kind of stuff ! Before I was here on SOC I didn't have anyone to discuss my thoughts. Two heads are better than one "they" say.....Bruce