Sleeping in and towing with stock conversion astro

[morjito24]

I am looking into the asto as a small tow / camp vehicle so, one primary question;

How does the fold down bench seat in a conversion work as a sleeper? Is it wide enough to sleep width-wise like in a full size van? - wife and I are not tall - about 5ft 9in. How much head to toe room is there with the bench converted to a bed?

Also, I will be towing a 3500lb sailboat on a dual axel trailer. Seems like the rating would cover the work with room to spare but am I just going to be crawling up hill or killing the van? I am looking at AWD models in the later body style. Does anyone have towing experiece with an AWD that could tell me what to expect on MPG and performance?

Thanks,

Doug

[mdmead]

The seat/bed in my hi-top conversion is not big enough to sleep on. Not even one person corner to corner. But I found a big plastic truck storage box that fit in behind the rear seat and when the bed was folded down, I could then stretch out fore/aft OK. (I don't remember if I used the box for my head or toes though...) One thing that worked for us was to leave the two middle seats out. This gave a lot more room for moving around and I could stand up enough to make it easier to get dressed. (We used the van for a changing room while we were snowmobiling.)

We towed an enclosed (clam shell type) 2-place snowmobile with our van. I figure we were around 2000 lbs, mayb a little less. We towed in 3rd at 65-70 mph and the gas mileage was in the 11 mpg range. I'm not sure how much it would have improved had we slowed down to 60 or so. Our van has the 3.42 gears and is AWD.

I never had any complaints using the van as we did. It was comfortable, traction was phenomenal, and power was never lacking.

[LiftedAWDAstro]

Sounds like an AWD Astro or Safari is exactly what you need. A 3500# load is not too much especially since the sailboat is not going to push much wind. Look through the towing and transmission sections for lots of reading.

First thing you must do is install an aux tranny cooler. This will keep the tranny happy for many many miles.

Next is to look for a van with 3.73 gears. If you can't find one with 3.73's make sure it has at least 3.42's. I will highly recommend you swap to to 4.10's so you can tow in OD and get probably 15 mpg depending on location and hills or mountains. Like Matt, we used to tow a 2 place clamshell snowmobile trailer with 2 sleds weighing about 1800#. I would tow in 3rd at 72 mph and get 9 - 10 mpg. That is running with a 4" lift and 30" tires. I then swapped in 4.11's and re-programmed the PCM and immediately was getting 15 mpg towing and 20 mpg empty on the highway.