I’m driving 400+ miles to visit my dear ol’ dad in Ventura, CA this holiday season and he wants me to bring his piano back with me. It belonged to my grandmother, it’s truly the only family heirloom that we have and he wants me to have it since he doesn’t really have the room for it anymore and because he was gonna leave it to me anyway and would rather that I enjoy it while he’s still around.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely honored and overjoyed about this. Its a nice piano, I grew up with it (and carved music notes into the keys when I was a wee tot :smack: to make mom’s piano lessons easier) and it will be a welcomed addition to our apartment in Phoenix.
Here’s the problem:
I’ll be driving a 2003 Ford Focus to visit my father. My fiance’ will be riding passenger and my 10 yr. old will be sitting in the middle of the backseat (the safest seat in the back, I’m quite neurotic). Obviously a piano is NOT going to fit in the car. My father, the genius wants to rent me a little hitch trailer for the drive back to Phoenix. I don’t know where this thing is supposed to connect to my car. I’ve looked around in the back and I don’t see anything that resembles a tow hitch, or anywhere that a tow hitch could even be fastened to the car. The back bumper is all plastic (fiber glass?) as far as I can tell.
Can a Focus really TOW anything?
Is this going to be physically possible or is he going to try to jerry-rig something and send me off to 400+ miles of towing terror? :eek:
Heeeelp! I tried to argue the logistics and got the, “Am I not your dad? Do I not know what I’m talkin’ about?” speech. :rolleyes:
We moved an heirloom piano a couple of weeks ago…make sure you have plently of people handy, and make sure you remove every possible wooden exterior section of the instrument first (which is a surprising amount).
If you’ve no tow-hitch, you need to fit one. Most ‘family cars’ nowadays don’t have them as standard, because they drive up the cost when most people don’t want one (hey, you didn’t notice until now ), and they make it harder to make the sleek lines look, errr, sleek. You can almost certainly fit one, but it’ll be a bit of work (including electrics to connect the lights on the trailer), and it’ll almost certainly work out cheaper to rent a truck. The other advantage of a truck is that a piano in a trailer will get a huge and potentially-damaging shaking. Just get a truck with a tail-lift!
What kind of paino is it? A grand piano will be a bit harder to tow than an upright.
Anyway, you can tow stuff with a Focus. Not much, but some. First of all, get your dad to agree to pay for all this, because it will be expensive.
First of all, you need to have a hitch installed. It doesn’t attach to your plastic bumper. It goes underneath, to the body of the car. The people who install it will also run the electrics, for the trailer brake lights and such. While you’re there, get them to install a electric trailer brake controller, because with a Focus, the problem is more that you won’t be able to start than that you won’t be able to tow the weight. All this should run you somehwere in the $400-$500 range. Call your friendly Ford dealer. They should be able to do that, or recommend someone who can. Expect a little ribbing that you shoulda bought a truck.
Make sure that the piano isn’t too heavy. A focus is rated for towing 1000 pounds, but that would include you and your luggage and any other people. So I would say a 500 pound upright would work, a 3000 lb grand wouldn’t.
Then, rent a trailer with electric brakes, and off you go. Get the guys who install the rig to show you how to work the electric brake controller, and get some practice in a pacrking lot with hauling around the trailer before you hit the open road. It can be a little tricky, both maneuvering and starting and stopping. Everything takes more time.
Also, to avoid serious handling issues, try to get the whole trailer to be shorter than the length of the Focus. And good luck! My guess is when Dad heards how much this will run him (controller+trailer hitch+trailer rental) he may drop the whole idea.
DANGER! DANGER WILL ROBINSON! <hooks flail wildly>
Rent a proper vehicle for towing any kind of a load. Towing with a front wheel drive car is a really, really bad idea. Not only is a terrible stress on the little car but it can be really unsafe for the passengers. The car isn’t made to have weight placed behind it on the hitch point and if you don’t have a significant amount of weight there the trailer will be unstable and sometimes lift on the rear end. The first time you go around the corner you’ll get the bejeebers scared out of you if you don’t wreck because the trailer is going to want to pass you on the outside. I know from whence I speak. I had to once tow a VW bug with a VW rabbit from Tucson to San Diego.
You can get hitches that attach to the unibody, there is no proper frame to mount it to, but I want to discourage you from doing this.
I so don’t want to tow this thing. It is an upright and not a grand, so it’s not that big, but I don’t want to risk damaging it and I certainly don’t want to spend my vacation having a trailer hitch put onto my car. Sheesh.
I’m gonna bat my eyes awhole lot and try to convince him to rent a truck and drive it out the next time he visits.
I’ve towed weights greater than a piano (yes, including passengers) across the UK with a front-wheel-drive Toyota little bigger and no better-powered than a Focus. It isn’t a problem. Of course, as Necros points out, a brake-fitted trailer will be easier, but will cost more. On the other hand, a rental trailer is probably a poorly-designed POS which will make the job harder.
If the trailer is kicking out around the bends when empty, you’re taking the bends too fast (you can’t expect to drive normally - try to never have to brake except on the straight). If it’s jumping around when loaded, it’s possibly because you’ve loaded it unevenly.
That would also work. I don’t know that my fiance’ is quite skilled enough to drive a UHaul 400+ miles and he can’t drive my car because he’s not insured on it and it’s been cosigned for under a very strict understanding between my mom and I.
We may just have to rent a truck and have dad come see his daughters new apartment. =)
I wonder how much it would cost to FedEx it. :eek:
Don’t forget the true value of renting the truck - you get to act like real men, strewing the dashboard with empty cans and food wrappers and maps and assorted junk, and alternating between listening to bad music and ranting at talk radio.
The smallest UHaul truck is, basically, a small pickup truck cab with a box in the back instead of the open bed. So it’s no harder to drive than a small pickup truck, and it’s got an automatic transmission. The biggest problem, in my experience, is getting used to the idea that you don’t have a rear-view mirror, although the side-view mirrors are still there. You’ll need to lift the piano into and out of the truck, but the drive itself should be no problem.
Well that doesn’t sound so bad. Maybe I could convince him to drive it back. It’s worth a try and he would even get to listen to all of his crappy industrial music cd’s and wouldn’t be tortured with my crappy emo mix cd’s all the way home.
I don’t think that UHaul trucks have CD players in the radio, but you can bring your own.
BTW, have you checked around with piano movers or household movers to see what they would charge? It might not be too much, and it could be worth it to let someone else deal with the heavy lifting. Plus they will be responsible for any damage. As you said, this is a family heirloom. If you’re flexible about dates, perhaps it can piggyback on someone’s else move.
Actually, with Dewey Finn bringing us back on track - how good is the piano? If it’s like most heirloom pianos, it’s not much good. But it’s possible it’s a decent instrument, in which case get a pro to do the moving.
), and they make it harder to make the sleek lines look, errr, sleek. You can almost certainly fit one, but it’ll be a bit of work (including electrics to connect the lights on the trailer), and it’ll almost certainly work out cheaper to rent a truck. The other advantage of a truck is that a piano in a trailer will get a huge and potentially-damaging shaking. Just get a truck with a tail-lift!
