On my trailer, the inner tongue already has horizontal slots in it to allow the tongue to slide. The outer tongue has a hole in it already where the damper strut is anchored. And the bending stress from the inner tongue is transferred into the outer tongue through the sliding bushings so any weakening/stress concentration would be in the outer tongue, and those seem to break where the bending stress is at a max where it enters the trailer. That said, the two-piece collar would work. If you're willing to disable it semi-permanently, a one-piece collar (a piece of tubing) slid over the inner tongue after the coupler is removed (two bolts) and then reattaching the coupler again would work.

All these ideas beg the question of whether it's a good idea to disable the brake system for over-the-road use. There are many trailers out there now without brakes: basically most that don't have an AL-KO system. We drove brakeless trailers for years before the early Libelles starting showing up with Eberle trailers. I've driven my Cobra without brakes a few times. I prefer not to, though, and probably won't disable my brakes even though I pull with a full-size van. But after crawling under the trailer in East Texas in the heat last summer to disconnect the actuator cables (and then reconnect and readjust them when I got home), I might devise a way to disable them quickly to deal with future problems. The problem this summer, however, was that the tongue jammed in the fully compressed position so I had to disconnect the brake actuating cables to free the brakes.

Chip Bearden