Anyone broken a Hensley?
Anybody broken a hensley arrow? I've had one since 2004. Been happily towing. On the way home tonight. I'm 4 turns from the house and I turn the corner and the hitch makes noise that didn't sound rig...
Forum Discussion
BurbMan wrote:
Other than that no issues. I know member here carringb had an issue with his HA, towing a triple axle toy hauler with his E350 van. He managed to bust up the HA pretty good but don't recall exactly where it broke.
Yup. Mine had almost the same failure. Ripped the hitch head to pieces, and in my case bent the bar-jack brackets, however the struts were fine. The failure was discovered about halfway through it's first trip, or about ~1500 miles. Since the struts were OK, I kept towing with it but it meant no more weight distribution for the next 1500 miles, almost all of which were on snow or freezing rain.
I don't have pics anymore unfortunately. Hard drive crashed a while back.
I was over 1400 pounds. More like 2600 pounds and for part of the trip over 3200 pounds of tongue weight. Before I towed with it, I called Hensley to ask for a return authorization, and instead they assured by it would hold up to my weights, and they "downrated" the hitch to 1400 pounds because that's what the heaviest hitch receivers were rated for. I did have to fabricate my receiver for the extra tongue weight (with PE approval), and my current receiver is rated for 6,000 pounds of tongue weight.
Hensley was surprised by the failure, and they refunded my purchase 100% and paid return shipping. We mutually agreed that it wasn't in either of our interest for me to keep "testing" their hitches for them. While Hensley may have tested a hitch successfully at similar weights, my hitch had poor weld quality which maybe wasn't typical?
I ended up with a Reese 17K Dual Cam setup.
