Weight Distribution Hitch/Air Helper Springs

[katkt]

Originally Posted by Arnie M

Here's a good video that may help you with your question,

I use air bags and WDH when towing my 28' motorcycle trailer.

I wish they’d of re-inflated the bags in concert with the WDH, to bring the slope on the TV back to 0.0, instead of the 0.25. I suspect, the truck may have been slightly higher in the rear before they started, so the 0.25 deviation, may actually have it level now.

I realize the exercise was all about selling a WDH, but that one extra step would have been interesting........especially since it would’ve taken all of a minute to inflate, and calculate any weight shift.

Very informative. It was interesting to see just how much load was shifted off of the rear axle, and onto the steer and TT axles.

[Tundra 2014]

You need a WDH w/ anti-sway. I have the Equilizer WDH w/ anti-sway, best of 3 hitch set-ups I have used. I also added a set of Timbren. These replace the factory bump stops and have no effect when not hooked to trailer. Most of the benefits of air bags w/ no maintaining at half the cost. These take about 30 minutes to install and eliminates the shock when you hit a large bump. Big improvement in my case, have had this for 3 years. I pull a nose heavy 30'-7K TT, 1K tongue, and these made for more pleasant towing.

[VernDiesel]

I transport for Forest River with a 14 ram 1500. I would want both a properly sized WDH with built-in sway control and a good airbag set up such as Timbergrove. Also a 3.92 gear would be much more enjoyable. Ram recommends a WDH for towing 5k or more. The airbags lift support & dampen the suspension for better road control and ride especially over rough pavement. They also reduce NVH. Airbags are for heavy bed loads when not towing but can also be an excellent compliment to a WDH especially for our coil sprung Rams.

Average wet weight adds 1000 pounds between batteries propane hitch & supplies so round up figure 8K camp ready. Set your truck and trailer loading and WDH via cat scale results to set your tongue weight close as you can to 12% of gross trailer weight as seen by the increase in total vehicle weight on the scales. Sherline numbers don’t apply when useing WDH. This would be about 960 pounds and at that percentage you should have no trailer sway.

So round numbers your truck weighs 6K this takes it to 7K. You need to generally replace your unloaded steer weight for max stability and braking power so this means camp ready you should adjust your hitch and load to set your axle weights to be around 3300 steer and 3700 drive.

Setting up your load like this via CAT scale results assures you meet spec and have a safe stable tow setup. Leave that “hopefully it’s not a white knuckle ride” for the guys that focus on payload and have no idea how to set up a rig to be safe & stable.

BTW this setup puts about 7k on the truck axles & 7k on the trailer axles about the reasonable safe limit for a half ton platform & bumper pull TT in my experience. If you were towing a lighter trailer or had a bigger truck setup would not be as critical as you would have a larger margin for error. Happy travels.