Hitch weight vs payload

4x4ord wrote:

dedmiston wrote:

4x4ord wrote:
I carry my 800 lb bike on a 200 lb lift. So I have 1000 lbs carried 2 feet behind the rear bumper of my fiver. My pin is lightened by about 700 lbs. I end up replacing some of that weight by carrying 400 lbs of weight in the bedroom closet over the pin.

To calculate how much weight will come off your pin you need to know the distance from the pin to centre of trailer axles; the distance from centre of trailer axles to the centre of your motorcycle when it is parked in the garage. Formula is simply:


Weight of bike x distance behind axle/distance from axle centre to pin = reduction in pin weight. If the centre of your 850 lb bike is parked 70 inches behind the centre of your trailer axles and the distance from the centre of your trailer axles to the pin is 350 inches your bike would reduce your pin weight by 146 lbs.

I'm having traumatic flashbacks to my horrible 7th grade algebra class where we spent 75% of the year dealing with fulcrums. I don't know why my dreaded teacher was so hung up on fulcrums, but 90% of us tuned out and had to play catch-up the next year to get back on track.

Having said that, how do you know where the fulcrum is on a tandem or triple axle trailer? Or is the fulcrum six feet wide?

I would expect that the more axles that are involved the less precise the fulcrum point is. but, because equalizers are used with our two or three axle trailers the fulcrum tends to be at the centre of the axles .... so on a triple axle trailer, the centre of the centre axle would be the fulcrum. A tandem would have the fulcrum fall at the mid point of the two axles. So long as the trailer and ground is level the equalizers do a pretty good job of distributing the weight equally to all the axles.