When to replace the hitch pin?

Grit dog wrote:
^Nope, but those may be good numbers for aluminum or brass or something. Hence why there’s no such thing as an aluminum hitch pin. You could rip 15000lbs in half just puttin the wood to it pulling your camper out of the driveway. (Not literally but it likely would not make it to the first campground.)
Any good hitch pin and maybe even the cheap $3 ones is going to have a shear strength FAR greater. Take normal 36ksi yield mild steel (that’s tensile strength). Ultimate tensile is more like 50ksi. Round numbers and approx.
Hitch pins are or should be 50-60-80ksi steel and shear is about 80% of tensile.

The factor of safety is 5-10 or idk maybe more.

Now bending is a different story. And why those silly reducer inserts for the trucks with 2.5-3” hitches are a horrible solution to being cheap with your hitch stingers.
The insert creates a short bending moment in the hitch pin and can and will easily pretzel a hitch pin. (And Waller out the holes in your hitch receiver, generally prior to bending the pin.)
I’ve cut off numerous bent pins due to those stupid little accessories.

Show me a strain guage showing 15k lbs on a 10,000 lb bumper pull. A truck with 7000 on the rear axle and sticky tires with a 50% coefficient of friction with only be able to apply 3500lb of shear force to the pin. Lock up all 4 wheels on a 10,000 lb truck and you are around 5000lb applied to the pin. But in normal use even those numbers are unrealistically high.

Also, try reading....I specifically said iron not steel as a worst case scenario and that steel can easily double the strength.

This is a shear failure so work in shear strength not tensile strength.

If you start mismatching parts of course you can have problems.

The point is even with the worst case scenario the pin is still several times stronger than needed.