Palisade, Front-Rear Weight Balance and Tongue Weight
Palisade is a great place. Must return for more wine tasting tours and bike rides. Hot though.
Wine in Palisade history
The trailer sway story took an interesting turn on this trip. As is becoming usual, we noticed the trailer sway, but it was worse after getting better. This time we had two bikes on the back and the sway was pretty bad. It was bad enough that we stopped in Arvada to move the bikes, two this time, into the car from the hitch behind the trailer. The sway improved (reduced) tremendously. By some stroke of luck, Mandy noticed that we didn't have bikes on the last trip, and had two on this trip. Then she thought it seemed better when we moved the hitch into the car on the way home last time. It seems trailer sway is something you can control.
Some web searching revealed that trailer balance is a big deal and sway is the consequence. You want about a 45/55 split of weight between back and front. This translates into 10-15% of your trailer weight as tongue weight. For our treadrop which weighs about 1000 lbs, that's 90-150 pounds on the tongue.
Weighing the tongue with a bathroom scale involves complicated methods to lever the weight so you can weigh 700 lbs of tongue weight with a bathroom scale. Fortunately with the smaller trailer come tongue weights that are small enough that you can weight it directly. I built a stack of cinder blocks so I could put the scale under the tongue and weigh it directly. With a mostly unloaded trailer, I got 105 lbs. I filled the water tanks in the back and the weight dropped to 85. I measured as I pumped the water back out and had 8 gallons which I figure weigh about 60 lbs. The time we had the bad sway we had water on board an another 85 lbs of bicycle and rack that were hanging on further back. I think the tongue weight could have been down another 25 lbs. I do remember that lifting the hitch onto the ball seemed pretty easy for 150 lbs (because it could have been as low as 50.
The problem then with the bikes way out back is that we have to much a fraction of the weight to the rear. A possible solution is to get a double receiver and have the bike rack just behind the car. This would leave the trailer balanced and add weight to the hitch and still stay below the 200 lb hitch weight limit. The problem is that the hitch is a 1 1/4 " class 1 hitch and double receivers are hard to find if not impossible for such a thing. They are available for the more heavy-duty class 2 2" hitches.
More to come.
Front/rear balance is a big deal to avoid trailer sway. Not overloading the hitch is important so you don't either put too much stress on the hitch and car in terms of weight, but also you don't want to overload the rear tiers. I've heard a lot of concern from both the manufacturer and my neighbor about not overloading the hitch. I wish they had seen the numbers above before imposing their opinion.
ALSO, I upgraded the DC electrical by adding 2 18Ahr 12 vdc batteries to the 20Ahr we already had. Nice thing is that the 2 new ones were about $35/each compared to the $80-odd I spent at the battery store back in May for one branded Duracell and immediately available. It ran the fan for over 24 hours today and yesterday.
We met a guy from previous trips. He seemed to be doing well.
Wine in Palisade history
The trailer sway story took an interesting turn on this trip. As is becoming usual, we noticed the trailer sway, but it was worse after getting better. This time we had two bikes on the back and the sway was pretty bad. It was bad enough that we stopped in Arvada to move the bikes, two this time, into the car from the hitch behind the trailer. The sway improved (reduced) tremendously. By some stroke of luck, Mandy noticed that we didn't have bikes on the last trip, and had two on this trip. Then she thought it seemed better when we moved the hitch into the car on the way home last time. It seems trailer sway is something you can control.
Some web searching revealed that trailer balance is a big deal and sway is the consequence. You want about a 45/55 split of weight between back and front. This translates into 10-15% of your trailer weight as tongue weight. For our treadrop which weighs about 1000 lbs, that's 90-150 pounds on the tongue.
Weighing the tongue with a bathroom scale involves complicated methods to lever the weight so you can weigh 700 lbs of tongue weight with a bathroom scale. Fortunately with the smaller trailer come tongue weights that are small enough that you can weight it directly. I built a stack of cinder blocks so I could put the scale under the tongue and weigh it directly. With a mostly unloaded trailer, I got 105 lbs. I filled the water tanks in the back and the weight dropped to 85. I measured as I pumped the water back out and had 8 gallons which I figure weigh about 60 lbs. The time we had the bad sway we had water on board an another 85 lbs of bicycle and rack that were hanging on further back. I think the tongue weight could have been down another 25 lbs. I do remember that lifting the hitch onto the ball seemed pretty easy for 150 lbs (because it could have been as low as 50.
The problem then with the bikes way out back is that we have to much a fraction of the weight to the rear. A possible solution is to get a double receiver and have the bike rack just behind the car. This would leave the trailer balanced and add weight to the hitch and still stay below the 200 lb hitch weight limit. The problem is that the hitch is a 1 1/4 " class 1 hitch and double receivers are hard to find if not impossible for such a thing. They are available for the more heavy-duty class 2 2" hitches.
More to come.
Front/rear balance is a big deal to avoid trailer sway. Not overloading the hitch is important so you don't either put too much stress on the hitch and car in terms of weight, but also you don't want to overload the rear tiers. I've heard a lot of concern from both the manufacturer and my neighbor about not overloading the hitch. I wish they had seen the numbers above before imposing their opinion.
ALSO, I upgraded the DC electrical by adding 2 18Ahr 12 vdc batteries to the 20Ahr we already had. Nice thing is that the 2 new ones were about $35/each compared to the $80-odd I spent at the battery store back in May for one branded Duracell and immediately available. It ran the fan for over 24 hours today and yesterday.
We met a guy from previous trips. He seemed to be doing well.
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