260 ft lbs of torque? Really?

JJBIRISH wrote:

Nvr2loud wrote:
Wow that is high torque, maybe that is the reason mine moves when taking the load bars off the hitch. With the load bars attached the hitch head moves up (pivots on the lower bolt) and the top bolt slides forward. When I remove the hitch bars the hitch head drops again.

I only tightened those bolts with an 18" long wrench, clearly I didn't realize that torque mattered on those two bolts. They are certainly tight enough that the nuts will never back off, so I'm not worried about that happening. I wonder if the torque spec is only so high to allow the proper angle to be set on that top slotted hole and not move like mine does. I will get it set properly now.

I didn't know the torque spec on my ball, so I used two 24" pipe wrenches to get it tight, then I used two 3 foot long pipes over the handles of the wrenches, so I'm not worried about the ball.

The hitch head angle is an important part of the hitch setup and it shouldn’t move under load… make sure the bolts are torqued correctly and that maybe some parts arent missing (like some Reese have serated washers and serated portion on the hitch head to lock it in place with the 300 pounds of torque on the bolts)…

To keep my bars perfectly parallel to my trailer frame, my ball needs to sit without an angle, perfectly upright. That means that when my hitch head moves upward with the bars attached, it is in the perfect position. It actually really shows that the bars are working. When I remove the bars the hitch head drops down demonstrating the extra tongue weight applied when the bars are off. If I needed a different angle then straight upwards, I would have needed to figure out how to tighten that bolt down more.