What gear for towing?

[AZ_Path]

If all goes as planned I will be purchasing a boat this weekend and driving it home from West Tx. I've been refreshing my memory on what I need to do and have a few questions. I see several posts about staying out of overdrive (no 5th gear), but others say you want to keep the torque converter locked up which does not happen in 4th gear. So my question is for the 2008+ which does not have the OD off button on the shift knob, should I switch the tranny to manual mode and stay out of 5th gear? What about the torque converter lock up?

The manual also states that when towing for the first time, do not exceed 50 MPH for the first 500 miles as you breaking in the drive train with the heavier load. I have about 60K miles now and have done limited towing and nothing this heavy. Should I follow this guideline strictly?

The boat is 21' MB Sports B52. It weighs 3900 dry. It is on a tandem axle trailer with surge brakes and I have the rear airbags installed. The only thing I don't have that I've considered is a WDH.

[skinny2]

I wouldn't worry about the break-in miles at this point. I tow maybe 6-10 times a year and have never done anything special with the transmission. Even with fairly heavy loads the transmission doesn't hunt around so I just leave it in auto. Usually once it downshifts on a hill it holds it until you top the hill. Hunting for gears creates a ton of heat so that would be a good time to switch to manual, but again mine has never done that and I tow in a very hilly area often. I just let the transmission programming decide when the TC is locked or unlocked.

Now if I was towing 10k miles a year I might research it further as I don't believe these are spec'd for that type of service life. But for general towing I don't think it needs any special treatment. I'm at 110k and no problems so far!

[oreogaborio]

3900 for the boat. How much for the trailer?



I tow a 4-5,000 lb trailer about once a month or more during the summer in pretty hilly terrain (New England).

You shouldn't have any issues unless you're in crazy hilly terrain. If I'm on the highway and it's hunting gears a lot I'll turn off overdrive.

[AZ_Path]

Well I made the trip. Thanks for the input in this tread and the many others that have contributed in other threads. I was much more prepared and comfortable thanks to the information that everyone provided.

Since it was my first time towing such a large load and I was going such a long distance, I wanted to start slow to see how the Pathfinder performed. I'm happy to say she did great and I'm very pleased at how well things went. I was a little nervous about possibly needing the WDH that others have said they needed when towing, but it was not an issue at all. There was no sway even as fast as 80 MPH. There was quite a bit of cross wind in West Tx but it was not an issues other than getting the boat dirty.

Braking was also not an issue. The trailer has surge brakes on both axles so I hardly knew it was back there which I was pleasantly surprised with. I figured it would be more noticeable than it was.

I'd estimate I averaged around 70 MPH for most of the drive. I left the transmission in it's normal gear the whole time and it didn't hunt around at all. When driving up hill the RPM was probably around 3K and when things flattened out it was in the low 2K range. I averaged 11 MPG which was pretty much in line with what others reported. On completely flat land I was able to get up to about 14 MPG, but the hill climbs were around 8 MPG.

Overall I'm very pleased with how well things went. When I bought the Pathfinder years ago I knew I wanted to tow, but wasn't really interested in a full size SUV. The Pathfinder seems to be a very capable mid-size SUV. Too bad she's a dying breed.

Here is a pic taken when we stopped for lunch. I has the rear airbags at 25 PSI and they did their job well.

[skinny2]

Good to hear and that's a nice setup. Those bags are good for 35psi though, looks like you could have taken out a little more squat. I run mine 20psi empty.

[AZ_Path]

Good to hear and that's a nice setup. Those bags are good for 35psi though, looks like you could have taken out a little more squat. I run mine 20psi empty.

Good point. I couldn't recall the max pressure so I didn't want to go too high.

[volvite]

Nice boat. I'd like to borrow that.