Al-Ko Trailer Tongue failure

On Thursday, September 8, 2016 at 9:32:24 PM UTC-7, 2G wrote:
On Monday, August 15, 2016 at 1:01:57 PM UTC-7, wrote:
My failure was at the actual hitch not the tongue. I had two failures actually, one with the original hitch from Cobra and the second on a replacement hitch from autozone. the euro hitch has one vertical and one horizontal bolt, the replacement had two horizontal and one vertical bolts I had to use one of the vertical bolt holes away from the tow vehicle and drill the horizontal hole in a different location to make it fit the failure was in the vertical bolt hole, and the hitch " ripped" the metal away. Luckily the horizontal one held. My latest design, I doubled the hitch plate with 1/8" steel "U" channel and drilled out to match the tongue. 1/2" bolts still one vertical one horizontal and so far so good.

Sometimes what happens is a design fails and you strengthen the failed part, only to discover that the next weakest part of the design fails. This is the epitome of a "bandaid" fix. The whole system needs to be analyzed to find an engineered solution.

Tom

Bringing this thread back up as another thread about towing with smaller cars hints at the subject.

The AlKo trailer tongue on many trailers has a placarded limit of 100kg.
Some are rated 80kg.
Don't overload the tongue if you don't want it to fail.
In the case of smaller vehicles, this also avoids overloading the rear of the tow vehicle, perhaps putting too little weight on the steering axle.
If you need to carry more weight, put some elsewhere, perhaps in a drawer below the trailer, a Cobra option, or an IMI retrofit. I've installed both.
My last drawer install successfully took the tongue weight of a trailer down from close to 400 pounds to below 220lb / 100kg with the same load on board.
Jim