Tow bar drop down plait

[RegandPat]

Can you help or advise me please.
I have a 4x4 and pull a Swift 490sel van.
The problem is I can not hook up with the spare wheel attached, so every time we go caravanning away my Pat has to struggle to remove the spare wheel (only joking) with me.
So I did manage to higher the spare about 2 inches but we found that this obscured the back window but did let us hook up.
Looking through the Towsure catalogue and I see a drop down plait that lowered the tow ball by two inches and I have noticed that the van when coupled up is a bit higher at the front.
Is there a height that the van should be when towing and can anyone see any pitfalls to this.
It would lower the tow ball by two inches and the Al-Co handle would not fail the spare wheel.
Thanks for any help
Pat and Reg
PS. may have posted twise, sorry.

 

[Sproket]

In theory, all towbars should set the ball at the correct height. Both the British Standard BS 150 1103:2007 and the EC Directive 94/20/EC, require the centre of the towball, when the towing vehicle is fully laden to its gross vehicle weight (but without the caravan attached) to be between 350 and 420mm from the ground. This should be compatible with any reasonably modern caravan, given one or two provisos:-
If the car manufacturer chooses to set the tow ball height towards the upper end of the height range, and especially if the vehicle has a relatively high load carrying capacity, it may be that under normal operating load conditions the tow ball is significantly higher than this range. This is permissible according to the letter of the standard or directive requirements, but may result in difficulties achieving a well set-up outfit.
Off road vehicles are exempt from the height requirements in the EC Directive, in order to permit them to achieve the necessary ground clearance for off road use. This may make a fixed-height tow bar inappropriately high for safe, stable on-road towing. When choosing a tow bar for an off road vehicle, therefore, ensure that it is either: (a) a fixed height bar which is similar in height to those made for conventional cars, or (b) a height-adjustable bar which can be set to an appropriate level for on-road towing or off-road driving.
Reg.
The best thing to do is measure your tow ball height when you have the car / truck fully loaded & check that if you do lower it two inches, that your van front is not too far down as you will possibly catch the jockey wheel on speed bumps........if that is not a problem then do it But make sure all of the bolts are torqued up tight

 

[susiep]

Hello Reg and Pat
What sort of 4x4 do you have? We had to hitch up and engage stabiliser on our Abbey with our Nissan Terrano

 

[susiep]

Whoops forgot to say - with the rear door open. Once stabiliser was engaged then we could shut the door!!

 

[RegandPat]

I have a very old Mitsubishi J reg 2.5. deisel drinking beast.
Now the door open maybe the answer and that would save me a lot of hassel, will give it a go this weekend.
I will hook up first then....
Just remembered, we could not open the door as we tried at Exeter last week but like the idea.
Thanks for your input.
Reg and Pat

 

[WatsonJohnG]

Alko do a removable handle as in the link below:
http://92.52.96.201/pdfs/4x4stabiliserhandbook.pdf
You can achieve the same thing by removing the long screw that holds the red handle on
Hooking up:
Remove long screw and red plastic handle
Position coupling over the car tow ball with the 2 stabiliser arms fully raised(minus red handle)
Lower the coupling onto the ball until it clicks on and green button shows
Press the 2 stabiliser arms down to take up the slack and then replace the red handle and screw to apply full pressure
Unhooking
Raise the red lever as far as possible
Remove screw and red handle
Raise the 2 stabiliser arms fully and unhitch
Hope that helps

 

[Parksy]

I tow with a Pajero and had the same trouble. All that I did was to take the red Alko Handle off, I keep it in the back of the truck and I just slip it over the forks to engage the stabiliser when I've hitched. You have to take care when unhitching that the forks don't dig into the spare tyre when you wind down the jockey wheel to unhitch. You could buy one of these from Fleabay if you can get one at the right price.

 

[ProfJohnL]

Hello Reg & Pat,

I think Sproket may have given out slightly wrong information.

The EU stipulate the height of the tow ball should indeed be between 350 and 420mm, but when the trailer is fully loaded, hitched and ready to roll. (there is little point of having an unloaded value)

And secondly the regulation applies to private tow vehicles, and is only discounted for some 4x4's I'm not sure of how the exemption is actually worded.

You will need to check with your vehicle manufacture if a drop plate can be legally used with your vehicle.

 

[Steve L]

Hi Reg & Pat.

It is correct that chassis based $x$ vehicles are exempt from the tow bar height regulation, this is because of the inherant design of the vehicle being considerably higher than cars. Also it is recognised that the majority of 4X4's are used to tow a variety of trailers hence why a lot have the drop pin and ball hitch combined coupling fitted. Quite a few have an additional sliding hitch height adjuster fitted allowing a vast adjustment of around 200mm if required.

As long as you don't mind your 4X4 looking a bit agricultural, you coud fit an adjustable coupling and hitch the van at the lowest setting, apply the stabiliser and then using the caravan jockey wheel raise the hitch head to travelling height. As a safety precaution, I would chock the rear of the caravan wheels and ensure the breakaway cable is fitted to the main towbar frame and not looped over the towball.

I used one of these fittings on our Diahatsu and it was very usefull as you can by taking the two securing pins out, remove the (in my case greasy) shin bashing towball, leaving behind a channel plate that is behind the bumper as such thus reducing the shin bashing or dirtying of her majesty's frocks.

The other method described here works just as well so I'm sure you'll succeed in the end.

All the best, Steve L.

 

[Heethers]

We have the new Style Shogun which has two positions on the tow bar that allows you to extend forward by 2" so it clears the ALKO stabaliser. We had the Mitsubishi tow bar fitted due to warranty issue's, a little dearer than others.

 

[Lutz]

For anyone interested in the definition of an "Off Road Vehicle" which is exempt from the towball height requirement, here it is:
87/403/EEC.pdf

 

[Sproket]

Hello Reg & Pat,

I think Sproket may have given out slightly wrong information.

The EU stipulate the height of the tow ball should indeed be between 350 and 420mm, but when the trailer is fully loaded, hitched and ready to roll. (there is little point of having an unloaded value)

And secondly the regulation applies to private tow vehicles, and is only discounted for some 4x4's I'm not sure of how the exemption is actually worded.

You will need to check with your vehicle manufacture if a drop plate can be legally used with your vehicle.

John,
The information that i posted for Reg is copy / pasted from a Technical information leaflet by the Caravan club.......
Page 5 on the pdf document below.....
http://www.caravanclub.co.uk/media/1022853/choice-of-towbar-mo.pdf

 

[Easyvanner]

Seems pretty brain dead designers and manufacturers that turn out new modern tows cars without taking in to account modern tow hitches that will be fouled by their mounting point of spare wheel

Something for the caravan industry and press to address with the car indstry

 

[Lutz]

The technical information from the Caravan Club still doesn't stay what constitutes an "off road vehicle". It is for that reason that my previous post provides a link to clarify the definition.

 

[Lutz]

Quite frankly, I think that the caravan industry has a fairly weak lobby within the car industry. The car industry, being so much more powerful, can afford to ignore requests by the caravan industry. From the car industry's point of view, why bother about a market which only represents a small fraction of the total? Besides, it normally only affects caravans with AlKo hitch-type stabilisers, not the Winterhoff design, so the ball is really in AlKo's court. Another solution would be to fit electronic stabilisers as standard. These are superior anyway and they don't foul anything.

 

[Easyvanner]

Car manufacturers include -
Tow hitch points and provide cut outs for the swan neck
Software in the traction /braking setup for towing
Wiring to take to electrics
Uprated specs for towing
Placing a spare wheel close above the tow hitch or having a door that can't open or close when using a trailer or caravan isn't helping anyone be they al-ko caravan owners or somebody using a horse trailer.
"Good design" encompasses the end users needs surely. Poor design is a door or spare wheel that gets in the way, why bother offering all the bits and bobs needed for towing and then make hitching up difficult

 

[Lutz]

It would be more appropriate to argue the other way round, that 4x4's with rear mounted spare wheels were around long before AlKo put their hitch-type stabilisers on the market so AlKo should have taken this into account when they designed them. They should have designed a product like the Winterhoff that doesn't foul. Why should the car manufacturers take responsibility for a problem that they didn't create? Any solution on their part would probably add product cost on every car, thus penalising customers who never use their 4x4 for towing. And AlKo obviously think that the low volume of vehicles affected compared to the total don't warrant a major design change, but that the 'fix' replacing the handle with a removable one is perfectly adequate in such cases.

 

[Gafferbill]

…….to answer the OP
I have a 4x4 that was fitted with a Towsure drop down plate in 2001.
This was done so that my caravan sat level and to prevent the tow ball obscuring the rear registration number plate.
This set up has not caused any problems and has towed my caravan down to Gibraltar and up to above the Arctic Circle in Norway and many thousands of miles in between.

 

[RegandPat]

Problem solved.
I bet you are all keen to know what I have done, I was amazed how simple the job was.
Just a recap, the spare wheel was failing the Al-Co hitch when hooking up.
I had a good look at my tow ball and there was two holes below the bolts of the tow ball, so with a spanner and a big hammer removed the tow ball lowered it down about an inch to the lower holes.
Then did up the bolts and gave the spanner a whack with a sledge hammer.
Later that day I reversed up to the van so the tow ball was just under the van hitch, opened the back door and hooked up, closed door, then did the reverse to unhook.
When the back door is open it dose touch the van so will have to be careful.
I will have to borrow a torque wrench from some one later but not towing for some time now.
Well thanking you all for the help and guidance.
Reg and Pat

 

[Heethers]

like l said early, on my Shogun's tow bar it can be extended by 2" to allow clearence of the spare wheel, l am pretty sure Witter make the Tow Bars for Mitsubishi so l think they will do a tow bar for other 4x4's that will clear the spare wheel.

 

[WatsonJohnG]

Maybe Witter do a towbar that will enable a standard hitch to clear a spare wheel but Alko didn't take that into consideration when designing the Alko Stabiliser Hitch as many people have discovered

 

[ProfJohnL]

Hello Sproket,

The quote you have given certainly does say without the caravan attached, but that seems to be contrary to all other documents I have seen from multiple sources.

The Caravan Club is normally a fairly reliable source of information, but they are not regulatory authority, and they can get things wrong and have done so in the past.

I will endeavour to look up the actual regulations from the source documents when I find them..

 

[Lutz]

The quote says "at gross vehicle weight". As such it doesn't matter whether the caravan is attached or not. If the car is fully laden at its gross vehicle weight and the caravan then attached, it would be overloaded by the amount of the noseweight. In other words, if you intend to tow then you must not load the car up right to its gross vehicle weight, but you must leave a margin for the noseweight.
Gross vehicle weight always includes the noseweight if the caravan is attached.

 

[ProfJohnL]

Hello Sprocket,

As promised I have done some research. The relevant EU document is 94/20/EC.

Its title is

DIRECTIVE 94/20/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL

relating to the mechanical coupling devices of motor vehicles and their trailers and their
attachment to those vehicles

of 30 May 1994

and I have found a copy available on the www at:-

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:ZfRunzPXMrIJ:eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do%3Furi%3DCONSLEG:1994L0020:20070101:enDF+94+20+ec&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgxdPAOxRBu5lQhfTWJo3aJ1fF7PCWaZtOi68XuAS3T2uTVZ40_FnFmnynpb0zm14B56Crb_uDzvh2-AzKkl4mNFiogLBKHb08ZNqlUUQdHmcKFHkZ49MRj7k6HJ1U0fLag9z5G&sig=AHIEtbSE8fdfH0E8N4jwRZs63NAaxGAaqA

.
The document covers a wide range of trailer coupling device, but the relevant sections for caravans are found sections V and Vii

In summary :-

Annex V of the document (page21)

Requirements for mechanical coupling devices

Caravans and domestic trailers utilise the class A 50mm ‘ball’.

The 50mm ball, is fundamentally defined as a sphere of 50mm diameter, but in practice its top is flattened, so the top surface is less than the radius from the centre of the ‘ball’ The permissible tolerance to the diameter of the flattened surface means it is not predictable distance from the centre of the ‘ball’.

Thus the only practical dimensional reference point for the ‘ball’ is the centre of the spheroid portion. (see fig2 in the reference document)

ANNEX VII (page 54)

REQUIREMENTS RELATING TO THE TYPE-APPROVAL OF THE
VEHICLE TYPE WITH REGARD TO THE OPTIONAL ATTACHMENT OF MECHANICAL COUPLING DEVICES TO THIS VEHICLE.

2.1.

Attachment of coupling balls and towing brackets

2.1.1.

Coupling balls and towing brackets must be attached to a vehicle of
category M1, category M2 below 3,5 tonnes and category N1 in a
manner which conforms to the clearance and height dimensions given
in Figure 30. This requirement shall not apply to off-road vehicles as
defined in Annex II to Directive 92/53/EEC

Refer to fig 30 on page 55.

The vertical height of the centre of the ‘ball’ is shown a s 350 to 420mm (Vehicle load).

This is where some ambiguity could arise.

If as the CC document suggests it ignores the trailer nose load, then it could also ignore any user load placed in or on the vehicle. Such an interpretation is illogical, as has no reference to the prime function of a tow ball.

It is my considered interpretation that the term “vehicle load” refers to the whole load applied to the vehicle, This based on the fact that the nose load of a trailer is considered as part of the tow vehicles Gross Vehicle weight and is distributed between the axle loadings of the tow vehicle. It also a more logical senario as the height of the tow ball will be affected by any nose load imparted by the coupled trailer.

Other organisations have also interpreted these regulations, and most concur with my conclusion, that the nose load must be considered as part of the tow vehicles loading when assessing tow ball height. The CC seem to be out of step on this point.

 

[Lutz]

You are correct, John L. The total weight (mass) of the caravan comprises axle load plus noseweight. The towload that car manufacturers specify is identical to the axle load (because only the axle load is towed). The noseweight is part of the weight of the car (because noseweight is carried, not towed). Any other interpretation would result in double counting.