How to Reduce Tongue Weight on a Trailer
How to Reduce Tongue Weight on a Trailer
Posted on May 18, 2022
Carrying a load behind your vehicle might be challenging. You need to have good handling in maneuvers and on curved roads. Considering that you need to load the trailer with cargo, it’s important to manage how heavy your vehicle is.
Having a heavy tongue is dangerous, but your loaded cargo will be swinging around if your cargo is extremely light, making your travel unsafe. Therefore, you need to find the golden balance to have a safe journey. Here’s what you need to do to reduce trailer tongue weight while maintaining a safe trip.
Manage the Trailer Weight
Generally, you need to aim to have the tongue weight equal to 10-15% of the overall loaded weight. If your total combined weight is 2,000 pounds, the hitch ball needs to be around 200 to 300 pounds.
However, some vehicles might have restrictions on the load mentioned in the manual or instructed by the dealer. In this case, you need to carry a lower trailer tongue weight to meet the safety standards.
Calculating the Tongue Weight
You can calculate how heavy your vehicle is at any scale house, following these steps:
- Bring the vehicle and the trailer loaded with cargo.
- Place the vehicle’s wheels on the scale platform, and ensure the trailer's wheels are outside the scale. The scale result is called “combined loaded weight.”
- Move away from the scale, disconnect from the trailer, and weigh your vehicle alone on the scale to find the “solo weight.”
- The tongue weight is the difference between the combined and solo loads.
Moving the Cargo
The way your load is distributed over the trailer plays a major role in the tongue weight. If the cargo is loaded near the hitch ball, you’ll have a higher tongue weight. However, moving the cargo away from the hitch ball will have less weight on the trailer tongue.
That’s because when you move the cargo, you’re pulling the pressure away or towards the trailer’s wheels. You might need to move your shipment several times and rescale your vehicle to ensure you reduce trailer tongue weight safely.
Sway-control Accessories
Lower weight on the trailer tongue can cause your cargo to swing while driving, especially if you’re driving at high speed on the motorway or under certain weather conditions. Plus, if there’s nothing that you can do like re-distributing, you can use a sway-control device.
A sway-control kit is a small device placed on the hitch ball, which helps you control the pressure on the hitch ball to enhance the car’s stability while driving.
Wrapping Up
Lower your trailer tongue weight by finding the recommended weight that suits the towing vehicle, and scale your car to ensure it’s safe to drive.
Distribute the loaded cargo to manipulate the combined load weight. The trailer tongue shouldn’t be extremely light and swing, nor should it be overloaded, making it harder for you to control the vehicle.
It’s crucial to manage your trailer tongue weight to ensure you have a safe trip travelling across the states.