Apogee Adapt-X 500 Folding Utility Trailer Review
Review of the Apogee Adapt-X 500 Folding Utility Trailer
AJ: What's up everybody. It's AJ with etrailer.com. Today, we're going to check out this Adapt-X 500 folding aluminum trailer from Apogee. Now, what makes us special is like I said, it folds. So it takes up less space. You can fold it up here in the front end and the back end, and then it can store in spaces you couldn't get the trailer before.
So in the front of the garage, maybe. You can still get your car in there. Or on the side of your garage, you don't have just a big old trailer sitting next to your house. This one folds up, it goes against the house. You can get a cover for it, put it on there.
That way the elements don't get to it. It's very versatile too and customizable, whether you want to put high walls on it, that way, if you're using it to move just as furniture or something like that, or load your ATV on there, or you can even load it up with gravel or mulch and it's a dump trailer, it actually tilts back, helps you dump that out of there, making yard work way easier.Let's check it out. Right away, we want to let you know that it's 10 by five feet. So, that's how much space you're working with inside the trailer. And it can handle a weight capacity up to 2,712 pounds.
So, that's how much you can load into it. Just wanted to let you know right away, because no one buys a trailer without knowing how big it is and how much stuff they can fit in it. Let's jump right in and see how it folds, since that's the most important part of the trailer. First, I want to give you a heads up. It's good to get your hook and loop fastener undone now because it's easier to do it now than when it's folded up and you need it.
So, with that done, we're going to pull the pins on the side. I already did it over on your side.Some of the pins slide right in and out, other ones, you have to work and twist a little bit. We're going to set these aside, so you can drop them in place to help hold it up when we got it folded up. With those removed, first thing you do is you pull up the back first. So, we're just going to go ahead and do that. (silence).Now, we'll come back and add our pins in, and that's going to help one, store these pins, and two, hold this in place. It will catch us if it comes back down, which it's not. You see me shaking it. It's not even close to tilting back down. So, it will be fine. Then we can go up front. Unplug our four pole, then remove our locking pin. You can see you're a little limited on space. Get your hands in there, so it takes a little bit extra time, not a big deal. I'll remove the pin here from our latch. It's also in there nice and tight. And I got to work it out. Now we're going to throw our latch, which releases the top. Now we're going to lift up the front. Slide in place. And come back with my pin, and put in place, so it acts as a stop. That way, it wasn't seem like it was going to fall, but now, I can let go of it and not be worried.I'm going to go ahead and do the hook and loop strap while I'm here. Pull it nice and tight and repeat this process on the other side. Now we're going to remove the second pin and lock up here. Pop that off. Now, make sure you grab the tongue of the trailer when you go to pull this pin out, because it's going to fall after you remove that pin. Might have to lift up on the tongue a little bit to get that pin to come out.So, it pulls out, just make sure you add a little . you can pull up on the tongue a little bit. It helps that pin come out. Maybe have a friend lift up on the other side. That just helps it get out a little bit easier. I got to remove the tongue. Now we also tilted this back. When we went to go remove the tongue, just so it wouldn't tilt forward, these are going to catch it. So, it's not going to flip over on you. These will hit the ground before anything happens, but just to be safe, we tilted it back. So, when I removed this tongue, the missing weight didn't cause any issues. You're going to attach the tongue to the trailer. That way it's all together. Or you can keep it unattached and just slide it to the front of your garage or on the side of your garage. It's much easier to put this somewhere than it is this whole trailer, but we're going to go ahead and hook it on there because they added these just for this instance, to get that one in the bottom.Try and line up the one at the top the same time. You want to lift it and drop them in at the same time. Now it's clipped in. With it folded up, you can just push it to the side of your garage. So, I'm tilting it just a little bit forward. You can see, like I said before, these are going to catch it if it falls back. So, you don't have to worry about it falling back on you. So, you just add a little bit of pressure back here at the top, tilt it up. I can do it with one hand. It's really easy to do. And then you just push with the other hand.We're going to lower it down again, those catches are going to get it on the front. And now, it taking up way less space than it was before. How much space does it take up in this state Well, it's 83 inches wide, then it's going to be 72 inches tall. And that's to this part here. But with the addition of the ability to add the tongue to the bottom, it's going to actually be at 76 inches tall. So, just so you know. Also it's going to be 40 inches deep. So, that's how much space it actually takes up. So, if you're thinking about, if it's going to fit in your garage with your car, you can actually measure that out and see. We got it folded up. It wasn't that bad to do. It's pretty safe. I don't worry about it as much as I thought, going into it when I was like, "Well, how's it going to hold when it's folded I'm going to have to worry about it falling over on anybody."It's got those stops. I easily push it to the side. I can easily move it back out, unfold it. Let's see how it actually handles some cargo or handles on the road. I'm going to unfold it, go outside, and attach to my car. Now, it's on the lower of the gate. Similar to the latch on the front, you just pull these pins out, push the latch back, and now it should fold out. You want to grab it by the outside one and pull it down like that. Push on the hinge. Now we're ready to pull up our ATV. Joe here's, going to help us with that. He's going to pull it in for me.The ATV is loaded. We strapped it down already. I recommend getting some, etrailer Ratchet Straps. They're a good way to get it nice and tight. You don't have to worry about any slack on these straps, that's holding it up here. We did it down there and it made it way easier with the built-in tie-down points on this trailer. I know we worked with the Optimax before, it didn't have any tie-down points. You can add some and drill them into your trailer. And we use the railings, but these built-in ones we're way better to get that nice tight pull on the front and back. So, this thing can't move anywhere on the trailer. So, let's hit the road and see how it does. Roll into the parking lot. Going over the same bumps we went over earlier.So far, there's not a whole lot of trailer noises, but that's because of the weight of the ATV coming down on it, it's not going to have that much rattling and moving around. It's also adds that extra pressure on the front of it, with the ball on the ball-mount, it's not going to rattle as much. I'm going over the speed bumps slow. We'll speed up here in a second once the trailer gets over that. But even that, you can hear it, but it's not as loud as it was before. I can pick up the pace a little bit now. Yeah, it's pretty quiet back there now. But that's the thing is you don't think about this when you got your stuff loaded and you're going somewhere with it fully loaded. You don't recognize this until you're on your way back after you've emptied the trailer, that's when it's really loud.We drove around the parking lot. I think it did pretty well. I mean, of course when it was empty, it's an empty aluminum trailer. It's going to bounce around a whole bunch because there's nothing pushing down on it. There's a lot of noise coming from the ball-mount area too. But when we loaded it down, that added that extra pressure on there, you could barely hear it was back there. We went over the speed bumps. Of course, you're going to hear it on the speed bumps, but it still wasn't as loud. There wasn't as much of rattling. With all the pins involved in it, I thought, for sure, you'd hear more rattling around, but you didn't. And then the tie-down straps also made it way easier and probably secured it way better than it was on the Optimax just because we had to go around rails and had to get creative there.This one, we didn't. We have designated spots to use, to make sure this thing stayed put. Another thing that we liked about it was the ramp, the way it folds out like that, was way easier to pull that ATV up then on the Optimax trailer, that tilts back on ya. So, then you drive it up and then it comes down as you drive. That's a little risky. I mean, I'm sure everybody does it all the time, but this one, with that ramp was way easier to get up into the trailer. No big deal. It's going to be the same way, you just back it out. It's not just for hauling ATVs. It actually works as a dump trailer. Let me remove these pins. I got . make sure you disconnect your four pole and go ahead and take off your locking pin. And then finally, the clamp that holds it together, we already pulled this pin out, flip this latch, you can see how the dump trailer comes up a little bit already.It also functions like that. So, we can tilt up and help dump whatever's in there, so you get some balls or rocks or something like that. You can dump it straight out of the back. It makes it easier. You don't have to use buckets or anything. I'm going to let it fully back up. So, now it's touching the ground. You can see how much of a tilt you have. And that's, like I said, maybe great for getting that mulch to flow down there or even the rocks to just dump into a pile there at the bottom. Another measurement to keep in mind is how long the ramp is. So, we measure from here to the ground right next to the ramp, and we got 48 and a half inches. So, just remember you have that space when you go to pull your ATV on there, you're going to need that room to lower this ramp down and actually use it.While we're back here though, some things they included, I thought we're nice we're the LED tail lights. So, that's another thing that, if you had to get your own trailer, build it from scratch, you'd have to do the wiring along with that. This one is nice. It's all in there already. It's ready to plug and play. You just attach the two four poles together up front. You're good to go. You just plug in your vehicle and then you're good. Another thing they have back here is the hook and loop fasteners. Those are awesome to help hold it up when it's folded and they're also bolted into the rails. So, you don't have to worry about them coming loose and flying off while driving down the road or wherever you store them separately, when . try and find them when you have it folded up, they're attached to the trailer, so they're always going to be right here. The good thing about the trailer's how customizable it is. So, if you're not just using for your ATV or a dump trailer, you can also get an attachment for a motorcycle carrier.So, if that's more your thing, you can do that. Now, that permanently mounts, but you can mount it toward the side, get your motorcycle here and maybe your ATV next to it. Or maybe something else next to it. Maybe you want to do kayaks and canoes. Sure, you could just throw them here in the trailer itself, but they actually have an accessory to carry them up top, so then again, you can put your motorcycle underneath it or maybe your ATV underneath it and your kayaks up on top. They also have a deflector, so if you want to install that on the front of it, in front of your ATV or your motorcycle just to help deflect any rocks that your truck kicks back at ya, there's a bunch of options to really make this trailer exactly what you want it to be for what you're hauling.This is how it's going to arrive to your house. It's on a pallet, you got the straps. So, the first thing we're going to do is cut those straps and remove the plastic. So, I'm just going to go ahead and stand to the side. Stay out of the way. Be careful, it pops up. So, just don't stand in front of the strap while you're cutting the strap. With those cut and all the way, we're going to move the plastic. Now we got the plastic removed into the side, I'm going to cut this open and get the instruction out. And it's going to tell you how to remove it from the pallet from here. Now you've had a chance to review the instructions. We're going to go through it here so you can see, because I know it's all a bunch of text and it's way easier to see somebody to do it than read it. So, let's get to it. First off, I'm going to cut this strap and then remove this plastic.Now, this isn't going to fall because it's secured by the zip ties here and down here. So, this shouldn't fall down or caus any issues. So, just cut this and again, same thing, stand to the side because you know it's going to pop out. So, we'll stand aside. I'll cut the strap. So, that's loose now. And now, I'll work on ripping up this plastic and getting it off around the trailer. Looks like the cardboard on the wheel-wells come off too, when you come around. Now, we're going to cut the zip ties on the tongue here to get it loose. And I'm going to start at the bottom because it should be able to swing off the pallet then. I'm going to try and rest it on my shoulder and then cut the ones up high. So, we'll get this one first. All right. It's not that heavy. It's all good. Just lower to the ground. Actually, we're going to set it aside and get it out of the way. Now, I'm going to go around and remove the foam ends here. Just again, cut more zip ties.We can do that on all four corners. Something I recommend doing before the next step is going ahead and unwrapping the tongue of the trailer. That way, you get all the bolts and stuff out of here because when you undo . the next step was an undoing the blocks underneath it, and you got to tilt it. You're going to want this ready to go, so you can install it. So, we're going to go ahead and start ripping away the plastic. Next step, you're going to want to get a second set of hands. Zack here is going to help me out. I'm going to take the drill and unscrew all the screws in these blocks, one at a time. So, I'm going to do these two first. Then knock out this block with a hammer and I'm going to go down the line and do that. Zack's going to hold it to make sure we can ease it back down and set these tubes on the pallet.They say in the instructions, make sure you don't push your hand in between this and the pallet, or get your hand under there just in case. Now we're going to knock out this last block. It's going to fall underneath the pallet. It's out of the way. We're going to set it back down. So, now we're going to go in front. Zack's going to help me again, holding in place. We're going to move through these blocks just like we did before. Now we're going to take the tongue and attach it here at the base. Make sure you line this up in a straight line. It'll make it a lot easier when you go to align those holes. It's got a hole in the back. Just line that up. I'll run our pin through it. Here we go, it's coming out the other side. I can add the lock. And now the tongue is in place.We could tilt it back towards the front. The tongue is going to help balance it out, so it's not going to lean too far. It's pretty sturdy. Now, we come to the side and undo the hook and loop fasteners, that's going to allow us to start folding it out. Now Zack's going to hold the back of it. I'm going to lower down the front and start folding out the trailer. Now we're going to come up front and add our pin in our lock. Looks like it's going to be easier to put our pin in this way because there's so much going on here. Goes right through. You can see that the base of the trailer is in this holding spot, let that go through. Push the lock, it's locked in place. I can't pull the trailer up and out, so it's good. We'll go ahead and attach our four pole while we're here.Now, we're ready to lower down the back. Just slowly bring it down. And now we've got to unfold it. Thanks Zack. Zack: No problem. AJ: Now, we're going to take our pins and put them in the four spots, that way it keeps it from folding up. You just put the pin through the hole, add the clip at the end and repeat that process on the other three holes. Now, last thing we're going to do is attach our latch that keeps our trailer from tipping, or the top portion from tipping up or folding. So, you're just going to remove this pin down here. It is kind of close, but you can just lift it up, get it on there nice and tight and then replace the pin. Now, the pins in there, it's not coming out and this can't fold up on you. Now for the final step, got it hooked up to the car. Just going to pull it off of the pallet. I think that about does it for all the trailers. Thanks for hanging out. And I hope this helped.
Patrick H.
12/31/2022
I have a Mule Pro MX EPS SIDE BY SIDE. Will the X500 be big enough?