Connecting to Your Tow Vehicle (Hitch, Electrical, Chains & More) | How To Tow
All right, Autumn, here we are outside on a beautiful fall Detroit day next to a great example of a dual axle trailer. Uh, I think we should start by reviewing the parts we talked about before regarding the front of the trailer and how it gets hooked up to our tow vehicle. All right, good. Yeah, let’s do it. Awesome. Let’s start at the very tip. So, this section up here on the tongue of the trailer is obviously where we hook our trailer to our ball hitch and the place where we’re going to lock the hitch down. Next, we have our chains. Do you remember what you use those for? They act as a basket. Right. Right. Exactly. We always cross our chains just in case a trailer were to come off its hitch while we’re driving. The chains can act as a way to catch the tongue of the trailer, prevent it from scraping along the ground. Um, next we have our trailer jack. And this adjusts the height, right? Correct. Yep. We spin that to adjust the height. We obviously have to take the trailer tong higher to get it on top of the ball hitch. And so that helps us with that task. And then the last two pieces here, we have our electrical connection and then our emergency brake connection. Our electrical connection comes in two forms when towing. You’ve got a seven pin and a four pin. Seven pin connection is going to control not only the brakes, the lights. And then a four pin connection is strictly for the lights on your trailer. The last piece, this silver wire, uh that’s for our emergency breakaway. So, should we have the trailer become unhooked from our vehicle, when that wire is pulled, it activates those brakes on those axles to slow and stop the trailer. All right. Well, you’ve done such a good job explaining, so I think I can do this. We’ve got the tongue of the trailer here. We’ve got the chains. This here is the tongue jack. We’ve got our electrical connection and our emergency brake actuator ready to tow. Why don’t we walk down the side and we’ll talk about our axles. All righty. Let’s see. So, on this dual axle trailer, you’ll notice something about the tires. We have the chocks in the middle of the axles themselves. We’re achieving the same goal here. We’re making sure the trailer doesn’t move when we’re loading it or hitching it onto our tow vehicle. Um, it’s important to note that keeping those chalks in the middle allows easy adjustment as opposed to having to take a step to adjust on either side. Right? When we’re talking about loading our trailer, keeping our load evenly distributed, as we’ve reviewed, is really important. It not only gives us better driving dynamics, but allows us to remain stable when we’re driving down the road. Do you remember that percentage that we talked about how we should distribute the weight? 60 in the front, 40 in the back. You got it. Exactly. If we’re talking about a dual axle trailer, the best thing we can do is to put 60% of that weight forward of the line between the two tires. So, right down here, this is our center point. I see. 40% of the weight towards the back of the trailer not only gives us the best weight spread again, it also allows us better driving dynamics across the board. I see. So, if I have that load correct, how do I calculate which 60 is going in the front and the 40 that’s going in the back? That’s a great question. So, we always start with the GVWR, the gross vehicle weight rating for both our tow vehicle and our trailer. That allows us some baselines. Then, we can load the weight onto the trailer and appropriately distribute it based upon best guesses or estimates. Imagine you have a 500lb drum and that drum while standing upright doesn’t have much surface area. Should you tip it over, then you can start to align it where you need it to be and sort of estimate this is about 60%. This is about 40%. It all comes down to math if you want to take the time to do the calculations. You can get it just about where you’d like it to be, but a visual representation of 60% forward, 40% back will be enough. All right, that makes sense. All right, should we get it hooked up? Let’s do it. Okay.
This video provides essential knowledge for customers new to towing or needing a refresher on trailer connections and initial setup.
