Saw this Harley on the back of a 5er yesterday

fj12ryder wrote:

valhalla360 wrote:
Let's say 800# with the lift.

Just eyeballing it, the bike is probably twice the distance behind the axles as the pin is in front of the axles. That translates to around 400# off the pin weight.

In addition both weights wind up on the axles or about 1200#.

So if you trailer has 2000# of cargo capaicty, you are down to 800#.

Is that the new "fuzzy math"? :) If you were talking about a single axle trailer then you might be close, if you actually measured it and not just guesstimated. I hauled a swivel-wheel type trailer behind my Big Sky 5th wheel. I weighed everything, both before I hooked up the trailer and after. The trailer weighed about 1200 lbs., and 600 lbs. was added to the weight of the 5th wheel. IOW 600 lbs. was basically hanging off the back of the 5th wheel. It changed the pin weight by 40 lbs. Much less than the 400 lbs. you're guessing at. By an order of magnitude actually.

This is real life and not conjecture.

Where was the weigh station. I want to avoid it because it's wrong!!!!

More likely you changed something else and didn't realize it.

No conjecture.
- The pivot point is midway between the wheels. As long as the trailer stays level, the weight on each axle will be roughly equal.
- Yes, you need the exact measurements but your calcualtions would presume the pin is more than 7 times the distance from the center of the axles compared to the distance to the bike from the center of the axles in order to limit your setup to only 40 lbs off the pin weight. I've never seen a trailer remotely close to that.

It's simple math. Take the weight of the object you are adding times the distance to the pivot point and then divide by the distance from the pivot point to the pin. The result will be the amount of weight taken off the pin.

Total weight added to the axles is the weight of the bike (plus lift) and whatever you took off the pin.

Real live calculations. Unless you have invented the flux capacitor or antigravity units, it's real life. You didn't magically break the laws of physics.