Sunday, Dec 21, 2014 at 11:37
Doug, that's an amazing piece of video. That 'van is
well built, usually they explode when they hit the deck on their side.
The video shows a classic example of poor 'van design by way of weight distribution though. The axle is dead central,
the overhang behind the axle is enormous, and I'll wager the van was loaded with too much weight in the tail, acting as a huge pendulum.
All that's needed then, is speed (overtaking) to accelerate the tailwag - and once it starts whipping, there's very little you can do to control it, no matter how good your vehicle control skills are.
A tailwag nearly always ends in disaster.
The way to avoid it, is to load heavy items forward of the axle, pick a van design that has the axle/s moved rearwards from the centre (this makes only a small difference to towbar weight), and utilise heavy wall or low profile tyres on the van to reduce rim sideways movement in relation to the road.
Having a tow vehicle that is adequate weight is also pretty important. There's a lot of people towing vans that are too big for their tow vehicles.
I once saw an amazing set of caravan skid marks, back around 1981, on the downhill run to the Phillips River
bridge on the South Coastal Hwy, West of
Ravensthorpe.
The river is in a huge valley and the highway runs steeply downhill for about a kilometre each side of the
bridge.
This set of caravan broadside skid marks started about halfway down the
hill, and went back and
forth across the whole width of the highway, for more than half a kilometre!
He/she managed to recover and pull out of the tailwag near the bottom of the
hill, where the skid marks reduced in intensity and eventually straightened up.
I reckon there would have been a substantial change of underwear somewhere up the road, right after that performance!
Cheers, Ron.
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