Quote:
Originally Posted by brulaz
... Wonder if I removed the tension bars on my WDH? Would that make it a regular hitch? Or if I put the bars on their lowest tension, would there be less tow capacity?   |
Yes. And yes.
Besides spreading the tongue weight across the axles (allowing TV carrying capacity to not be limited by just the rear axle GAWR), The WDH also spreads the loads better on the hitch receiver attach points.
It does this by placing a positive lift on the hitchball. Essentially, you've got a wheelbarrow where the spring bars are the handles, and you're lifting the tongue weight as you pick them up.
Of course, the real wheelbarrow handles are at the trailer wheels. To see just the WDH effects, set the axle weights to zero in my spreadsheet, and then watch what happens to the spring bar settings and the rear axle load on the TV as you set the the amount of weight that gets moved to the trailer axle from zero on up.
Without a WDH, the weight of the tongue hangs* on the rearmost hitch bolts multiplied by the leverage of the hitch ball vs the bolt pattern. With a WDH, the rear bolts go to zero and the forward-most bolts carry the tongue load (the really good hitch receivers, like I'd expect to find on a pickup with a big tow capacity, have 4 bolts in the pattern up there). So with the WDH, you'd have both lower point loads plus more bolts working and therefore even lower loads per bolt.
*These are static loads. Dynamic loads are potentially much higher and add to/subtract from static loads (don't worry, the guys who build cars and trucks already know about this).