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Simon Johnston
United Kingdom
6155 Posts |
 Posted - 10/01/2023 : 20:33:30
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Frank Ashley's advert for a Brian James Minno trailer reminded me of a problem I had with my Minno Shuttle, and its solution, which might be of relevance to others. I didn’t want to intrude on Frank's For Sale thread so started this one.
When I got my Minno Shuttle I had a Volvo V50 as the tow car and the combination worked well with a 90 kg nose weight. However, when I changed to a Land Rover Freelander 2 as the tow car there was a significant discrepancy between the height of the tow hitch coupling and that of the tow ball. So much so that the nose weight was around 100 kg. Putting the combo on a weigh bridge the front axle of the trailer scaled 470kg and the rear axle 740kg. Clearly something was wrong and the conventional way of reducing nose weight on a single axle by moving weight rearwards clearly doesn’t work with a twin and would just make matters worse. With a twin the height of the coupling compared to the ball is critical. If you have to lift the coupling too high in order to get it on the tow ball, you’re actually trying to lift the front axle of the trailer and thus increasing the nose weight and placing more load on the rear axle.
The answer was to find a way of closing the gap between coupling and tow ball. For serious tow vehicles the ball height is often adjustable, but not on regular cars, and drop plates are illegal. But then I found that Brian James actually make a spacer to fit between the coupling and the A frame of the trailer specifically to address this problem. It’s not something they advertise but this is it.
Fitting this to my trailer brought the nose weight down to 90kg with the front axle at 550kg and the rear at 660kg. An altogether better balance as previously the rear axle was actually overloaded.
Simon J
J3437 |
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