Hello all! Wanted to give a quick update in case it's useful to anyone going through the process of ordering, receiving, assembling and registering one of these trailers, particularly in Washington State.
I want to preface the below by saying: we are still overall extremely happy and excited to get out in our new Scout! We feel so fortunate to be able to fulfill this dream of ours!
But boy it's been a saga.
The good part: registration was super easy, surprisingly! (Thanks The Wolf 1 for offering your tips) We had hoped but didn't know for sure that it would come with a VIN/MCO. But it did! and therefore was a trivial matter to go to the licensing office here in WA state and give them our VIN/MCO certificate and invoice from 4WP. Yay!! Big relief.
The rest has been a frustrating process, caused in equal measure by 4 Wheel Parts and by Smittybilt. We have kept up a relatively good cheer about it though, I guess Covid has made us all hopefully more tolerant and patient! 4WP was a total mess to deal with. It feels like they hardly want to take your $8k. The short version: it took talking with about 8 different people at the national number plus 2 local stores, to sort out our order, track it properly, and come up with a feasible plan to pick it up, since one of the stores claimed they don't even have a forklift. All throughout, communication was horrible, and only dogged persistence on our part prevented our trailer being shipped to Timbuktu or some such. On top of that, when our friend with the big box truck went to pick it up, 4WP forgot to give him the wheels/tires plus a bunch of the other parts. It was a comedy of errors. Not that we didn't meet some very nice and helpful people at the store, but many of them were reticent and reluctant to be helpful. So in summary, we don't mean to rant, but just a heads up... when you buy from 4WP, do NOT involve the website/national office... go straight to your local store, make a solid plan on how you're going to pick it up and load it, and follow-up, follow-up, follow-up!!
As for Smittybilt... as we were assembling our trailer, about 2/3rds into the day we realized they had sent us TWO left hub assemblies, and zero right ones. Ha!! Well just as in dancing, two left feet don't get you very far. That was about 20 days ago. Well, after being in contact via email and phone with about 4 different people, they say they are "in discussions with the vendor" to locate a right-hand hub assembly. We keep pinging them a couple times a week, but they stopped responding. We understand things take time, in our brave new Covid world, but we don't see the justification for lack of communication.
On the bright side... when we assembled the trailer, we found that at least half of the locks on the door latches were faulty, in that the little springs had fallen out. We asked Smittybilt about this, and to their credit they promptly shipped out a complete set of new latch/locks, and much to our delight they had put in a little weld on all the locks to prevent the springs falling out! Super cool!
Btw we had another confusing glitch... the bump stops for the springs were poorly designed in that we couldn't get a 16mm socket into and OUT of the center part to install the bolts. The center was too narrow, so any socket/extension setup would get stuck. Super annoying! All we could do was laugh, and ended up sacrificing two 16mm sockets that may or may not fall out some day.
So we are in limbo, and await the fate of our beautiful new trailer, since at this time we don't even have an ETA for our hub.
Hopefully we will update when there's good news! Cheers and Happy Holidays to all!!
