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Trailer comes off at 75mph
Glad everything ended up without injury for you and yours
On another note, it really scares me when I see trailers being towed down the road and attached with very little hardware, be it light duty safety chains, crappy latching pins or inadequate hitches.
I required the dealer to install a pintle hook on my 12k utility trailer before it left the lot, and the boat would have one if it had electric brakes rather than the surge type. But even an improperly attended to pintle can kill.
A local fly by night contractor hooked his rig to his truck on a rainy morning and was in such a hurry he forgot to drop the hook on the pintle. Killed two people a mile down the road when the trailer drifted into oncoming traffic.
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Trailer comes off at 75mph
Begin Rant...
Sadly true. I found that my local marina runs their hydraulic trailer with the latch open, in fact the latch is frozen open. How do I know this you ask? Well, when the tractor towing that trailer with my boat on it blew a tire and almost sent her over an embankment I hooked on with my truck and finished the haul. The marina owner had fastened the trailer and safety chains as I backed under her. I checked the attachment before I pulled away but the locking mechanism was unfamiliar to me, it looked like it was latched.
Took it another couple thousand feet to my storage building and off loaded the boat onto blocks. I then delivered the trailer back to the marina. When I arrived I needed a yard attendant to unhook the trailer since I was not familiar with the hydraulic operations on the thing (it lifts itself off). He never flinched when I asked how he did that without first unlatching the hitch "it has been frozen for years, it will never come off with that much tongue weight" he stated. I purchased my own trailer a month later.
God help us.
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Trailer comes off at 75mph
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A defective hitch or any other part is operator/owners responsibility. Period.Being afraid of a hitch because of an isolated event is sort of like being afraid of bald tires, replace them.Most pintle hitches on larger trucks these days are self closing, you can't leave them open. On our big trucks and the highway tractor the pintle hook opens and closes by air and there is a warning light and buzzer in the cab if it is in the open position.Cutter, surge or electric brakes have no bearing on the type of coupler, I have several trailers that have surge brakes on a lunette ring. In fact my triaxle boat trailer I pulled the Fountain around on was equipped with that very setup.Best of luck.
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Interesting Murf, I suspected the lash allowed by the pintle would create less than desirable towing conditions with surge brakes. How did the thing react when braking? Did it slam the brakes a bit?
Pintle would be much easier on me as generally I am alone hooking up.
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Trailer comes off at 75mph
I looked at that hitch this weekend Murf and don't see a way to convert it to a pintle without butchering the thing. If I need to do that I may try to convert it to electric/hydraulic brakes.
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Trailer comes off at 75mph
Everything is relative to something else isn't it?
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