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What is the law what is safe
I have been working my butt off the last couple weeks moving crap up and down the state to my little price of paradise in NorCal....I need to rent a small backhoe (ie kubota) to do some trneching and excavate for my foundations....I have no vehicle with a trailer hitch....I have a 85 F350 Stakebed with a lift gate..it's the kind that fold underneath the rear deck of the stakebed...There is a stop plate where the gate folds in half, that holds the gate flat when unfolded......It is very heavy duty (3/8" steel), and everything is is attached to is very heavy duty as this is the attachment point for the lift cylinder.....It would be a perfect place to attach a hitch to IMO as it stays perpendicular to the ground as the gate is raised/lowered...I could build a bracket out of 1/4" steel for the ball and bolt the bracket to the left gate plate with 1/2" or 5/8" bolts....then I could lower the gate to the exact height I want and tow away....
but is this legal/safe attaching a hitch to a lift gate? If not, would installing (via bolts) another bracket from the hitch to the 1/4" stakebed deck to lock the gate in place make it legal? I had worked out another method, but this method would be much cheaper and easier to instal/uninstall....
Anyone ever done anything like this?
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What is the law what is safe
How do I have it load tested? I can;t imagine the thing coming loose...This hitch would be 5 times as heavy duty as the hitches I see hooked up to most pickups/cars.....That lift gate is made of some pretty heavy duty steel.....The worst thing that I could see happening would be the gate lowering down somehow...which I'd think wouldn't cause detachment, but would cause the tounge/hitch to drag on the ground...I'd probably know about that pretty quick..
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What is the law what is safe
My big concern is that I show up at the rental yard to rent the hoe, and they say, "you can't tow our hoe with that!"....or would they even blink?
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What is the law what is safe
My stakebed is a 1 tom dually. with 8 botl rims....It's just the attachment point....I'm wanting to attach it to the lift gate which is definitely attached to the frame (does a 4' diameter pipe with 1/4" walls solidly welded to the frame qualify as rigid?)...the entire framework of the lift gate is minimum 3/8" steel..(some of it 1/2" , and the stakebed truck is a 8' wide x 12' long stakebed with a 460 engine and a 10,000 lb rated GVW....
No doubt this is enough truck to tow a small backhoe on a trailer...the rental yard does not deliver, they have the thing on a trailer...my only question is the 'legal requirements' of a trailer hitch...I have no doubt that this setup would be five times a strong as anything youd find in a U-Haul setup bolted to the frame of a 3/4 tom pickup, but will it pass the insurance/lawsuit wary renta yard smell test? If not, what do I do, having a lift gate in the way of traditional tow hitch attachements?
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