Ball Distance from Bumper

chevor wrote:
You sacrifice stability the farther the ball is off the rear tires.

A proper WDH would negate that.

You sacrifice stability the farther the ball is off the rear tires.

With common store-bought shanks, and a factory or mass-produced aftermarket receiver on a typical pickup truck pulling a typical trailer, used within their ratings, no problems.

Of course when you start getting into non-typical situations such as a truck camper hanging back over the rear of the truck, or an odd trailer with an extremely short tongue, you can run into trouble, and specialized components will be necessary.

Anywhere from 4" to 8" between the back edge of the bumper and the front edge of the ball, IMHO, is the "no concerns" range in my book. It won't make a tinker's dam worth of difference where it is in that range as far as handling, capacity, durability, etc..

DutchmenSport wrote:
Good point about the truck tail gate clearing. My old Reese WD hitch system allowed the tail gate to clear the trailer tongue jack just fine. When I switched to the Equal-i-zer system, the shank hole is set different. Now the tailgate hits the jack on the tongue. I can't change anything there to make it different unless I had a new hole drilled in the shank... which isn't going to happen.

I had the same issue with my Equal-i-zer, but Equal-I-zer offers an 18" shank which works well and did not require any modifications. Only drawback is it is heavier than the standard 12: shank.

Dropping the tailgate is important to us. Why have the extra storage of a truck if you can't get into it easily? We had to find a longer shank to accomplish that and, we turned our jack sideways to give us a few more inches of clearance. I know that pushing the trailer back affects torque on the hitch etc but, our trailer is relatively light, a 19ft Airstream so, I believe we are safe. If you are close to your truck limits, check and recheck the implications. The extra length didn't seem to affect handling or stability in our case.

As already said, far enough to keep the tongue jack from hitting the tail gate when it's lowered.
I changed draw-bars for that reason and I noticed the newer Reece DC had longer draw bars.

If your shank has more then one lock pin hole, moving it farther away from the bumper can reduce it's max. tongue weight rating. Check specs on your particular WDH setup. Our Reese drops from 1200 lbs to 1000 lbs if moved out.

Good point about the truck tail gate clearing. My old Reese WD hitch system allowed the tail gate to clear the trailer tongue jack just fine. When I switched to the Equal-i-zer system, the shank hole is set different. Now the tailgate hits the jack on the tongue. I can't change anything there to make it different unless I had a new hole drilled in the shank... which isn't going to happen.

Think of leverage. The further the ball is from the hitch, the more torque there is on the hitch.
As an example, think of using a "cheater bar" on a wrench. The longer the bar, the more torque you can apply to a tight fastener.
It has been so long since I did weight and balance computations for aircraft modifications that I don't remember the formula, but one could just multiply the distance (in feet) from the ball to the hitch by the weight on the ball (in pounds) to get the torque (in ft./lbs.) on the hitch frame.
IMO, the ball should be as close as possible to the hitch.
Sometimes that "as close as possible" isn't very close!

Far enough to fully open the tailgate with the trailer on the ball.