Batmovan:
I agree 100%. We keep going around and around about the tongue weight getting distributed by a WDH or various other definitions.
To recap: the reason Ron made the original posting was that ffrnemtp (Doug) had felt his tongue weight had been lessened by his WDH and that was the cause of his sway. As Ron pointed out with the diagram on the initial post, all a WDH hitch does is remove load from the TV’s rear axle and through the use of levers, applies it to the TV front axle and the trailer axle(s). Now indeed part of the load on the rear axle results from placing the trailer on the hitch and the transmission of the tongue weight to the ground through the rear axle. But as the calculations show, the amount of weight moved around by the WDH bars has nothing to do with the tongue weight. Manufacturers literature will of course refer to redistributing the tongue weight evenly to all axles because it is when the trailer is attached to the hitch that the rear axle begins to sag.
As I mentioned above, the tongue weight is simple a result of how the trailer is loaded, and a properly loaded trailer will have around 15% of its weight on the tongue. Again I repeat: It's not the light tongue weight, per se, that causes sway. It's the improperly loaded trailer with too much weight in the back that is the problem. A WDH does nothing to change how the trailer is loaded. So Doug’s problem was not caused by the WDH further lightening an already light tongue load, as he proposed.
I just got back from a bike ride and had been writing a summary in my head as I rode, so I’ll post that next.
