2026 Palomino Puma26FKDS

The 26FKDS inverts the usual travel-trailer layout: the galley goes up front and the bedroom to the back. The Forest River factory describes the floorplan as two entries and two slide outs, with a metal exterior and a 20-foot awning, and an interior of a front kitchen and a rear bedroom — sleeping five in about 31 feet. Putting the kitchen in the nose gives it the front windows and pushes the bedroom to the quiet end, and the second entry door means you can get to the bedroom without walking through the galley. It is the shortest of the eight profiled Pumas and the easiest to place on a site. It carries the standard Puma build: a powder-coated steel I-beam frame with steel crossmembers under .024/.030-gauge aluminum skin, an AlphaPly roof membrane under a limited lifetime warranty, R-7 fiberglass insulation cut and glued between sidewall studs on 16-inch centres, a 5/8-inch Araucoply plywood floor under a 25-year limited warranty, an enclosed Darco-wrapped underbelly with enclosed water tanks, a tankless water heater and an 11 cu ft 12-volt refrigerator. Solar is roof and side-mount prep only — no panel is installed from the factory.

Palomino publishes an 8,553-pound GVWR against the 7,053-pound dry weight, leaving a 1,500-pound cargo capacity and a 1,035-pound dry tongue — a heavy tongue for the length, which is what a front kitchen does to the weight distribution, and worth checking against your payload before you assume a shorter trailer means an easier tow. The tank set is 43/70/35 gallons fresh/grey/black. Palomino and Forest River publish no MSRP for the Puma line, so confirm street pricing with a dealer. The 26FKDS is the Puma for a small family or a couple who cooks and wants a rear bedroom in a body that still fits most sites.

Forest River lists all four Puma packages as required, but the Value Shopper Package specifies a 13,500 BTU ducted air conditioner and the Limited Edition Package specifies a 15,000 BTU unit in place of it — the two required packages contradict each other, so confirm the air conditioner on the actual unit.

Puma is Palomino's metal-sided value travel trailer — bumper-pull towables on a powder-coated steel I-beam frame, and a cross-shop against Forest River's own Salem / Wildwood and Aurora, Prime Time's Avenger, Keystone's Springdale and Jayco's Jay Flight SLX. Eight floorplans are profiled in full and linked below; the remaining plans are catalogued and shown muted. The 26FKDS on this page is highlighted.

This floorplan carries its water comfortably. A full 43-gallon fresh tank is roughly 24% of the 1,500-pound cargo capacity, leaving the 26FKDS with a usable gear budget even when you tow full.

The published dry tongue weight of 1,035 pounds is 15% of the 7,053-pound dry weight, which sits inside the 10–15% band usually quoted for stable towing. It is still a dry figure: loading the front pass-through and the fresh tank both push it up.

Nothing above changes the ceiling. Loaded to its 8,553-pound GVWR the 26FKDS is towing 1,500 pounds more than its 7,053-pound dry figure, and that is the number your vehicle has to be rated for — not the brochure weight.

Tank balance is generous here: 43 gallons of fresh against 70 grey and 35 black, so waste capacity keeps pace with supply and the fresh tank is the constraint that ends a dry stay.

Of the 33 Puma floorplans profiled here, the 26FKDS is the lightest by GVWR at 8,553 pounds — the entry point to the line and the one most likely to suit a vehicle already at its limit.

Either side of it in the same line: Puma Ambush 25TH is 320 pounds heavier at 8,873 lb GVWR.

Against the 26FKDS: the Rockwood & Flagstaff Ultra Lite 2606WS is 11 lb lighter and 1 ft shorter and sleeps 2 fewer; the EVO 2985VBX is 18 lb heavier and 3 ft longer; the Coachmen Catalina 263FKDS is 47 lb heavier and sleeps 1 fewer. Those are differences in the published numbers only — what they cost, how they are built and how they live are separate questions each of those pages answers on its own terms.

Those are the nearest travel trailers from other lines by weight — one per line, picked by proximity on that figure and nothing else. They are listed so the same tow vehicle can be checked against real alternatives, not because they are equivalent inside; layout, build and price diverge sharply across that group.

For scale, the Puma floorplans profiled here run 6,173 to 15,114 pounds dry and 30 to 43 feet of exterior length across 33 plans. Where a floorplan falls in that spread usually says more about which vehicle can tow it, and which site it fits, than the layout name does.

Every profiled floorplan in this line, with the full weight table, is on the Puma line hub.

This catalog tracks 18 specification fields per floorplan. Named sources publish 16 of them for the 26FKDS. The rest are not shown, because the alternative is reading a figure across from a sibling floorplan or from what the segment usually does — and a number nobody published is worth less than an admitted gap.

Not published for this floorplan: interior height, tire specification. If you find one of these in a manufacturer document for this plan, it belongs on this page.

The completeness figure at the foot of this page (94%) measures the same thing on the full field set: it is a measurement of how much this floorplan’s manufacturer publishes, not of how much research went into the page.

Values on this page carrying an asterisk were derived by arithmetic from published figures, or come from a single source, rather than being printed directly by the manufacturer. The flag travels with the number into the downloadable spec sheet.

How every figure here was sourced and checked is set out on the methodology page.