Weight Distribution Hitches

With heavy transport you generally get heavy pig trailers that are particularly long. The tow vehicles are more solidly suspended and the distance of hitch to tear axle as a ratio of the wheelbase length is a lot less than a sedan or a lot of 4WDs.

The longer the van and the more weight that is built into the ends, the more you need WDH. I have a mate whose son had a lot of experience with two horse floats (which are not light weight.) He was continually slinging off at his father about using WDH - that was until he started towing his own caravan (much longer trailer.)

Regarding utes with bent chassis - all that I know of had air-bags installed. Air-bags do not have a linear spring rate as you compress them. As they get shorter they get much stiffer. As the back of the ute thumps down on bumps when travelling off road the rock hard air-bag takes most of the load and the springs take less of the weight. If you are needing stronger springing in the rear, beef up the leaf springs, don't use air-bags. When towing, use WDH, that stresses the chassis up, not down. You will have noted all the utes with bent chassis bend down.

In heavy transport, long heavily loaded "pig" trailers are by far the excpetion, generally if at all possible. some other more stable sort of configuration is used.

In heavy transport pig trailers are either short and heavily loaded like tippers, or long and lightly loaded like foam trailers...if it is long and heavily loaded there are far better options, particularly now the licencing system ignores articulation as a factor.

Most of our caravans and light trailers are in fact "pig" trailers and they call them that for a reason.

One of the real and present problems is that consistently arises in both caravanning and boating, the legal limits are pushed and stretchd as far as they will go.

and with that.

Time after time people want to tow the biggest, longest, heaviest AND most aquard thing they can with a given tow vehicle, and a very large portion of the time with a tow vehicle that is designed with pasenger comfort as a priority over load carrying capacity and stability under load... but yet we persist.

So along comes a very sucessfull turd polishing device that is the weight distributing hitch.

Don't get me wrong they are a usefull, valid and far safer option in many situations...but we need to recognise them for what they are.

An after thaught solution to a less than ideal situation.

An afterthaught item that places stresses on the rear of the vehicle, stresses that in most cases it was never designed to take

So don't be surprised if some vehicle engineers don't like them for their models.

As far as the rear of most pasenger vehicles and light utes being weak...it remains the case and regardless of it bending up down or sideways the fact remains.

And the fact will continue to remain because of the requirement for crumple zones on pasenger cars.

Have a look at the amount of metalwork that is involved in some of the maximum capacity tow bars for the bigger pasenger cars....the falcon is a good example..in most models the structure of the tow bar continues way under the rear of the vehicle and is not just bolted on somewhere near the rear bumper.

Look under the back of many of the smaller SUVs...they are not substantial, and there realy is no option of installing some sort of forward going structure, even if it could be effectivly engineered.

So don't be surprised if more and more vehicle manufacturers refuse to authorise the use of weight distributing hitches.

Aferall some of the quoted towing capaities these days are plainly rediculous for anything more than a quiet trip to the local boat ramp.

cheers

Amen