Tow hitch

You can get your tongue weight and all your other weights without buying a scale. It's not something that you will be doing very often, probably just once., So for me it's not worth it to get a scale, which may or may not be in calibration anyway.

It takes 2 runs through a public scale. Of course you first have to be fully loaded for travel in both the trailer and tow vehicle including all fluids, people, supplies, pets, gear etc.

Run 1 is with the trailer. if you have a wdh leave the tension bars in the back of the TV. Do not weigh with the wdh tensioned.   Roll one axle at a time onto the scale, get all 3 weights. Use subtraction to get each axle weight.

Run 2 is with the TV only. Again, get the front axle weight, then roll the 2nd axle on to get the total TV weight, and use subtraction to get the 2nd axle by itself.

The tongue weight is the combined weight of the two TV axles with the trailer minus the same 2 axles without the trailer. The total trailer weight is the weight of all 3 axles from run 1 minus the total weight of the TV from the 2nd run.

Those weights, your specs, and a couple measurements will allow you to fill out this towing calculator and see where you are.

Often you can use the scales at your local waste transfer station for free.

If you do buy a tongue scale then the measurements will be effected by the slope but if you level the trailer then that error will be eliminated. Trailer needs to be level, ground doesn't matter.





towing calculator

try looking for my posts that contain words like "scale" or "towing calculator".

Also load up your Frontier bed as you plan and let Curt know that weight as well. Their wdh has to lift that too.

It will be interesting to know what they say but in the end you'll probably need to decide how comfortable you are with the handling and rear wheel squat on your truck and whether you want to try to improve that. If I had to guess I'd say most folks here with that size truck and rpod probably do wind up using a wdh.

While you might be ok without a wdh, you will probably like the way your rig handles better with it, and it will be safer too.

First, don't go by listed dry tongue weight. Dry tongue weight has little to do with your actual loaded tongue weight. That depends on how you load how much water your carrying and where, whether you have dual or a single battery and/or propane cylinders, etc.

For example, I had to work at it to keep my tongue weight to 500 lbs even though the listed dry tongue weight was only about 270 lbs. Also, the wdh lifts both the trailer tongue and the weight in the back of your tow vehicle, so that weight has to be taken into accoubt as well.

Also bear in mind that a higher tongue weight is a good thing as long as it doesn't cause problems with your tow vehicle because higher tongue weight relative to total trailer weight reduces the trailer's tendency to sway. You never want to have your tongue weight be less than 10-11% of total trailer weight.

So how do you get a handle on this? First load up your trailer and tow vehicle as you plan to travel, including all supplies tools gear, water, people, pets, fuel, etc and get the actual weights (tongue, all 3 axles, trailer, tow vehicle).


If you look in my posts with the advanced search you'll see how you can get all that from a trip to your local public scale, as well as a link to a good towing calculator that will tell you know where are relative to your vehicle and trailer specs. You with most likely be surprised about how much everything weighs.

The calculator also lets you set up a wdh before you actually buy one so you can see what the effect would be. You will see that without the wdh the tow vehicle front axle gets lighter which can cause handling and braking problems. That extra weight has to go somewhere so the weight on the rear axle goes up by the tongue weight plus the redistributed weight from the front axle. So the problem is worse than you might initially think.

The wdh reduces the weight on the rear axle and redistributes that between the trailer axle and the front axle, the objective being to adjust it to bring the weight on the front axle back up to what it was without the trailer.

At that point there will still be some squat on the rear axle, because it will have the tongue weight (and only the tongue weight) on it.

I had a 1000 lb Reese Pro wdh. Worked great. Regardless of what your bar weight rating is, if your wdh is set up right the loads on the hitch/trailer/tow vehicle are the same. The difference is only that the lighter bars will provide a softer ride because they will flex more, and they will also bottom out sooner, similar to what happens when you go to softer vs firmer shock absorbers on a vehicle.

So Forest River is lying to you if they are blaming trailer damage on a 750 lb wdh. Blue Ox's recommendation is sound, that's a very normal rating for an rpod.

There is something else going on here. What specifically is causing the cracking, did FR tell you? What is being done to correct it?