Opinions on a single axle car trailer?

A well built single axle trailer with quality axle/springs/brakes/tires will be fine. Most people fall into the more is better trap. I have a 16' single axle car trailer with a 6000lb axle and it pulls fine and easier than a comparable tandem. The p.o./builder built it to haul 5000lb test weights for his scale business. He hauled all over the place for 5 years before l bought it from him. It scales out fine with a 5000 car on it behind my Jeep Grand Cherokee with 500lbs of tongue weight. It does have a strong 6' tongue on which l feel helps make it stable going down the highway. Every single axle I've ever pulled with a long tongue has been super stable at highway speeds. It's apples and oranges to you but that's my experience with a single axle car trailer.

 

Looks like a PITA driving over the wheels. You know some green trooper going to give you heck. I've always felt a tandem ( or tri)axle is more stable, why not a tag axle you lift? I think you're going to run into trouble with a setup like that, too much tongue weight. Seems a multi-axle distributes it better.

 

Why just a single place trailer?
Wally-mo and sun country I believe both make a single axle version. Single 20k axle, lo pro 22.5..

 

Gotcha. Nice lookin unit.

 

Trailer like that might work. I wouldn't mess with the drive tandems on the truck looking at those scale numbers. You'd be well over 20k on a single drive setup on some loads and would have to be worrying about it all the time. Even after shaving say, 1500 lbs off the back, you'd still only have 7500 lbs of payload which would be about 1 big pickup. Even with the front axle on single tires that gives at least an extra 10k so you can load nearly as heavy as the 34k they allow on closed tandem groups. That is probably a 40k rear drive set so in practice you'd be limited to the loading capacity of all 6 tires added together.

I'd be concerned about a couple issues. Stability at speed with only one 17.5" tire on each side. I think you'd need dual position anyway to put anything heavy on the trailer, again because of tire weight capacity but also because a DRW axle will be a lot less squirrely. I could tell the difference on converter dollies when I used to haul double pup trailers between the newer super single ones and the old dual position ones. Holding the tongue the super single dolly was much easier to twist side to side than the DRW dolly especially when the ground was wet, and I could tell the back box was much more squirrely going down the road with the single. The other issue would be tongue weight on the stinger hitch which is self-explanatory. I've got a 2.5" shank 2 5/16" ball hitch for pulling travel trailers and I think the vertical pin load max is 2200 lbs on it. That is a nice aluminum weigh safe unit with stainless steel turnover balls but I think even the 3" shank versions for newer pickups limits the tongue weight to around 2200-2300 lbs. So long story boring you might need to careful with how heavy a unit you try to put on this theoretical trailer because of how much weight will be transferring to the stinger hitch. You might be limited to 1 heavy unit on the deck, 1 light unit on the tilt and 1 light or medium unit on the trailer. 2 heavy units might be a bad idea. Even big car moving equipment is usually limited to 3 heavy units since they all need to sit end to end and low on the trailer.

 

DRW 17.5" axle will have to be a darn pretty beefy single axle to back up around 16,000 lbs worth of tire capacity. That's why more typically you're going to see trailer places like Shipshe build something like that with tandem 8k or 10k Dexter Torflexes with SRW 17.5" rubber. That gives you the balance to not overload the hitch, stability at speed and the needed weight capacity for heavy units. Trying to accomplish all that with one big DRW axle and not overload the hitch will be trickier to put it briefly but maybe not impossible. Close attention will need to be payed to the weight limitations of the hitch gear for safety and liability reasons.