Front up 1/2". Tons on bars. Bags help?

gschindel wrote:
Does seem to drive ok

Wouldn't bags decease the amount of force I need to put on the bars? To me it seems that "lifting" the back a bit with bags would put more weight back on the front??


I can't find anything from dodge saying about what the front should go back to.

No bags will NOT return lost weight to the front. they will only raise the rear. The front will still be light. In fact the bags will remove tension from the bars allowing the front to rise even more.

I'm betting the fact that you transferred 1/2 of the lost weight back to the front. will be all you need. If the truck, and TT drives well, and there is NO sway. You have accomplished your goal. If you still have sway. Keep working at it.

Since you seem to have got it right. Now add sway control. sway control is form those times when you induce sway by doing a emergency maneuver to doge something in the road, or similar situation.

I don't think 1/2" is bad at all. Try dropping all of the tongue weight on the ball without using the spring bars and measure how much lift you get!

I'm thinking you would be better off checking the hitch head angle and adjust as necessary to get more spring bar tension if it's really bothering you that much.

Thanks. I already have the ball tilted back as far as it will go. It just seems like having more links under tension would keep the bars and hangers from binding up and would give me room to put even more tension on them if needed.

I heard you match bars to tongue weight?? I know my tongue weight is way under 1000lbs. They don't flex up so I'm not sure how heavier would help give me more chain links to play with.

I guess you are enroute to Seattle by now and hope you don't have any issues or incidents related to the WDH.

The first thing that is mandatory is a good read of the sticky in this forum on how to set up a WDH which includes excellent info. on setting up a dual cam hitch. Once you have a handle on what to do, it's not particularly difficult to set up a dual cam and get it dialed in. It needs some patience though. Once dialed in, these WDHs are amazing.

You are guesstimating on the tongue weight and could be okay or not. It's very doubtful you need bars rated over 1,000 lbs. You may need 800 lb bars if anything. With your TT and 1,000 lb bars, you *should* have no trouble in transferring adequate back onto the steer axle. Guesstimating the TW is not a good idea, not only for the bar rating, but for the payload capacity of the TV. Also, over-sizing spring bars can damage a frame in some cases.

You can't go by the dry tongue weight, period and it's best to est. by using GVWR. GVWR of the TT is 7590 lbs and the TW should not be over 15%, or 1138 lbs at the upper range of the normal TW %. Even up that high, 1000 lb bars should be okay. TW is more likely to be 12-13%, and at 13% would be 987 lbs, so 1K bars look okay. If you have a forward FW tank and tow with it full, that can raise TW significantly (an exterior photo seems to indicate a forward tank).

You seem to have something wrong with the number of links under tension. Ensure that you have studied the dual cam setup info, available on this forum in detail. Getting the head/bar angle correct is very important.

What is the payload capacity rating of the Ram 1500? If inadequate, no amount of adjusting or installation of air bags will make things work out. What you need to do is load up the truck as you would have for camping, along with family and pets and go weigh the truck and subtract that from the door pillar GVWR rating. If you've added say 1K lbs of total payload and the trailer has a TW of 1K lbs, you could be well over-loaded.

Towing overloaded and on top of that, not having the WDH adjusted correctly can be very unsafe.