Rear bumper weight allowance

Here is what someone did to the TT I just bought. Works pretty well and is solid as a rock.

When in doubt; don't!

"4X4Dodger"......You need to look at a tent trailer bumper, they bend if you look at them wrong. The statement by "BigSur2" is basically referring to these lightweight sewer hose holders. Yours, by your own statement, is custom built and designed for substantially more weight. In the context of this post, these bumpers were not designed to carry a lot of weight.

BigSur2 wrote:
My rule has always been no more than one bike....with spare tire removed and stored elsewhere. The bumper is not made to hold weight.

This issue keeps coming up and I hear this often. But consider this:

The rear Bumper on my Gulfstream Innsbruck is a 4x4 box section of .090 or probably .092 steel. The rectangular Box sections that connect the bumper to the frame are the same thickness with about 20 square inches of contact surface with the frame with four, 5 inch long welds.

This is a structure that can support a serious amount of weight.

Shock loads...or what is being called here "bouncing" are important considerations but there is only a "shock" if something is loose, rises up and comes down on the structure. If something were fastened to the bumper shock loads will not be a consideration.

However the distance and weight on the bumper to the mounting point on the frame is a lever and must be accounted for. But this is about one foot on my trailer or less.

As for tongue weight. Yes putting weight on the far rear will lighten the tongue weight but it is easy to compensate for that with loading of the trailer. And it is not a one-to-one proposition.

Now maybe many other trailers bumpers are far less strongly built than mine, and I have considered the fact that mine may have been added on by the first owner. I do not intend to speak for all here. but merely to say that ALL bumpers cannot carry some weight is not accurate.

My rule has always been no more than one bike....with spare tire removed and stored elsewhere. The bumper is not made to hold weight.

THis is what I recommend. Weld that onto the frame, and then use your $50 HF cargo rack.

I agree with the others—it's not a wise idea and liable to cause you grief.

Besides the structural limitations, consider as well that any substantial weight on such a carrier will cause significant changes in the balance of the trailer—it's acting like a lever, so you'll be reducing the tongue weight and correspondingly increasing the weight on the axle. The tongue weight is already pretty low on that trailer; it might not take too much weight to start to have noticeable handling problems.

(Although it's not related to this discussion, I was rather confused or at least amused by Starcraft's website showing the Show Stopper Package as being a "Mandatory Option." :h )

bikendan wrote:
on a super lightweight TT like yours, you'll probably void the frame warranty doing something like that.
and the bumper is thin metal and poorly welded.

X2. I have a AR-One 17rd and would never bolt anything onto the bumper. Like most tts, it's paper thin and wouldn't support much weight.

on a super lightweight TT like yours, you'll probably void the frame warranty doing something like that.
and the bumper is thin metal and poorly welded.

It wouldn't be enough with that kind of leverage 3 feet out from the bumper! All the bouncing going on back there would tear the bumper off. If you could support that extra weight so it cannot bounce then you would be OK. Even if you put a receiver bolted to the frame, you would still have to keep the carrier from bouncing.