Curious to know if anybody else on the forum has done any towing with their Inline vehicle, especially a mid 60's pickup truck. I have a '65 Chev 1/2 Ton with a stock 292, headers, HEI and an aluminum intake with an Edelbrock 600 CFM carb and a Camaro T5 trans. Now my trailer is an enclosed 20ft V-nose with tandem axles and electric brakes. I also have a brake controller hooked up on the truck. Have only tried the trailer once around the block so not really towed it any distance. Uses the levelling bars on the hitch. Has anybody else had good lick towing? Would like to see more power from it, maybe an R.V. type cam? Any ideas?
Tks

IMO the first thing you need are Disc brakes on the front. I've never cared for the 1/2 tons lack of brakes. That's not saying you can't take it easy, keep an eye down the road and compensate. In an emergency 1/2 ton brakes are way inadequate.

You don't say what the trailer weighs.

The towing I've done has been with a 1963 3/4 ton, and a tired 292. I've towed more than a few old trucks on a trailer with it, not to mention the big cab over camper, but not both. Never had a problem with the 292, yes it could use more power. Worse case was dropping the granny box into third and running about 35 mph for 10 miles up a grade.

Larry

Don't worry about the power, just make sure your carb is tuned properly and your ignition system is up to par. The areas to concentrate on are cooling and brakes.

You need to upgrade your brakes. NEED to upgrade, especially if you have drums. And a bigger capacity radiator, I don't care how good a job it's been doing. If you have a clutch fan, replace the clutch. Period. Then haul away!

The truck has the later model 6 bolt power disc brakes and power steering on it. Using an 8" wide wheel front and rear with 235/70R15 with a stock 3.73 gear. Rad has one extra row of fins when I had it re-done. The timing has been an issue as I kept changing it a bit when I was towing my fiberglass camper trailer that weighs about 1800#. Never seemed to find the sweet spot for it. The enclosed trailer weighs about 2800# empty.

GMDad
I had a 69 C10 that I hauled a cab over camper 7 1/2 ft wide and towed a 24 Ft boat that topped 3000 Lb behind it all over Ohio, Michigan, and southern Canada with no problems. It had stock radiator no AC. Also standard shift with 4.11 Gears. Got around 8 or 10 mpg if I remember right. I don't think you would want to take it into the Rocky mountains but in our part of the world you should be ok. I pull my roadster behind my 41 plymouth on an open trailer with 3.50 gears and a 700R4, in this part of the country it does fine but when I had it in the mountains it strained on the long hills. I would probably go to at least a 3.90 gear if I was going back to the mountains with it.

The weak link in your combo is the T5.

The rest sounds more than durable enough.

Keep an eye on the fluid in there, a pump and cooler may be in order.

Best of luck to you.

You can install a MSD 6A box & an adjustable timing controller from MSD or others,if it pings too much,take some timing out,going flat open roads you can run more timing to get the most MPG out of it.

Control knob mounted inside the cab.

Sure a small RV cam will help & exhaust & intake mods. Stock 1 bbl carb is small.

MBHD