tow bars

[wendy_5041806]

can anyone please help to clear up our mystery , we got a second hand towbar for our audi a4 , only to be told by the audi dealer not to fit it ,??it has numbers on it and the letter ..r on the end of the numbers ,is it a recall or a reject ? we dont know , the audi people seem a bit cagey about this , so we are at a total loss ,our car is an r reg , all we have heard up to now is that it may have been upgraded but why cant we fit this one , please help its sending us round the bend ,...thanks ,...wendy&pete

 

[Damian]

Wendy, please look at this site, it should answer all your questions:http://towbarsrus.co.uk/towbarsrus/Towbars%20and%20Law.htm

 

[gary]

'R' for reject, this would imply it was faulty at the manufacturing stage, surly it would have been put beyond use rather than an R being stamped upon it?.

'R' for recall, if this letter was in place (added) then one would assume it looked different in some way, stamped after it went though the recall process and now implying the towbar was safe to use?.

After your car was made and can we assume the towbar, new tighter controls were enforced to make sure towbars met certain conditions. It is possible the dealer is warning you of this, but why should they be evasive?.

I really don't know, but you are right to be confused, I would be.

If you do decide to fit it, make sure all the 'spacer' tubes are present?. These pass though the chassis and are often left trapped in the donor car but are extremely critical. Without them bolts cannot be correctly tightened without crushing your chassis and will work loose.

 

[Gary_5039903]

The trouble with towbars is that even a slight face-lift to a vehicle can mean that the towbar has to be redesigned by the towbar manufacturer, so it could be that while your towbar is for an A4, it isn't quite right for your car. Also, I can understand that a main dealer may be a bit nervous fitting a towbat which isn't an Audi approved item. The other thing to remember is that a second hand towbar may well have certain parts missing (spacers, etc) or have had parts replaced with inferior, weaker items (bolts, washers etc). To be honest, I wouldn't use a secondhand towbar myself for the reasons above, for peace of mind, I would buy and fit a new one which I knew was correct for the car. One from Audi will be horrendously expensive, but one from Towsure, Witter etc will be much cheaper.

 

[wendy_5041806]

thank you all for your help and advise, we finally found out the manufacturer of the tow bar we bought , ..yes it was a new one , but wonder if the guy who we got it from encountered the same probs as we did and didnt want to tell us,.grrrr, the packaging has not even been opened, any way the people who made these tow bars for the audi tell us it is safe to use , we have got the proof in an e,mail, the company that make them is westfalia automotive in germany,(phew), thankyou gary we are having it fitted by a professional tow bar fitter, we also have been in touch with towsure, see where we go from here, we are still waiting to get excited about our first trip out ,lol, and thankyou damien for the link ,that helped a lot too, ..are we glad we found this site !!so much to learn again thank you all ,...wendy & pete