JBarca wrote:
I'll offer another opinion.
According to Reese, (and they have said this for at least the last 11 years I know of) Reese states that weight in the truck behind the rear axle is to be applied to the sizing of the WD bars.
This is a 4 meg Reese WD catalog file if you hit on it.
www.reeseprod.com/support/catalogs/Cequent-2015-06-Weight-Distribution.pdf
See the last page, page D-20 on the PDF.
Reese wrote:
The hitch weight formula for determining the load
which the hitch must carry:
HITCH WEIGHT* = TONGUE WEIGHT +
VEHICLE CARGO LOAD BEHIND REAR AXLE
OK, so that is what Reese has said for some time now. But, they do not describe to you how that actually works into the sizing of the WD bars. They leave it wide open for you to interpolate or just buy larger bars to cover any anticipated truck bed loads.
Now to the setup.
If you check your unhitched truck front fender heights or axle weights with the truck bed loaded and you hitch up and adjust the WD hitch to return the front end to unhitch height/weight, then the load on the WD bars is only from you adjusting the hitch.
OTOH If after you had adjusted the hitch as described above;
And you add extra weight to the truck bed behind the truck rear axle which is a large enough weight and or far enough behind the axle to lower the back of the truck, this can change the hitch head angle relationship to where it was originally adjusted to and add a level of tension to the WD bars. How much tension rise in the WD bar depends on how much the hitch head angle changed.
That is the only way I can figure (right now at least) why they feel you need to upsize the WD bars. If there are other ways, please point them out.
John
Thanks John for that input since now TWO MAJOR hitch manufacturers (Equal-i-zer and Reese) along with e-trailer have all confirmed what I have contended all along. Ron and I have disagreed on this before over the last several years with his "TRUMP CARD" being a decades old document defining tongue wt. as "THE AUTHORITY". All I can say is that what I have been advocating to me makes absolute sense and I guess one has to decide for themselves what should and shouldn't be included against the various tongue wt. ratings. While not critical most of the time it can make a difference in both receiver tongue wt. capacities along with proper sizing of WDH bars where many here advocate IMO cutting the size too close since they do not consider such items as the wt. of the WDH system itself or potential cargo behind the rear axle. However, IMO again WDH sizing is a two edged sword since unless you have "ENOUGH DOG" for your tail going too high of a WDH bar can result in a hasher ride on the more lightly suspensioned vehicles especially these 1/2T based TVs.
On this cargo subject it's probably more accurate that the wt. to be added is actually that seen "AT THE POINT OF THE BALL" so for example if the ball is 4' behind the rear axle and a 100lbs is added 2' (1/2 way) behind the rear axle then maybe only 50lbs should be added to the tongue wt. However, this really makes things complicated and why I think those advocating this simply assume any wt. behind the rear axle is at the point of the ball which would be the worst case which is what one should be using for safety reasons to begin with.
Larry
