meAt said:
rotovacguy said:
anyway, it's fine to load over the axle.."AS LONG AS" there's enough gear in the nose to get to10%
..L.T.A.
Exactly, I agree. The thread was from a few months ago, from when
John Olson put that
Sapphire TM in a trailer. Gary questioned the tongue weight of the unit, and I simply replied saying it looked just fine to me. I won't go into the details, but to make a long story short, let's just say me and Gary agree to disagree about loading trailers. It was my job, my livelihood, for 15+ years to load commercial trailers for a major LTL trucking company to the absolute maximum they could WITHOUT OVERLOADING any of the axles. We would routinely get to within 100 lbs per axle on an 80,000 lb gross.....not an easy thing to do. So you can say I have a tad of experience in that area, and even though the "big trucks" carry much more weight than a small unit like Bill's here, it's ALL RELATIVE, just on a smaller scale!
So yes, you CAN load a good amount of weight over the axles, provided the proper weight is stationed up front, as you mentioned. I used to pick up loads of steel for a custy of Kohler Generator outside of Chicago, and would place 2 pallets of steel side by side (about 9,000 lbs between the two skids), RIGHT OVER the trailer axles.....AFTER I already had a good 30,000 lbs of steel in front of it to properly keep my tractor planted to the ground! The loads would usually gross 79,200 - 79,500, just under the 80,000 gross limit. We even had to place small metal "spikes" under the skids which would grab into the wooden floor to prevent the skids from sliding and throwing off the weight distribution if you had to lay on the brakes hard, which is pretty common in that cesspool called Chicago!...

... There is no way in hell I would have loaded that kind of weight on the axles without a proper head load. I got the impression from Gary that he had a very tail heavy trailer, which would act like an out of control pogo stick, and be unsafe. His defense was that the place he bought it from loaded it that way, and they did it for many others, so it HAD to be right. :roll:
Anyway, without seeing actual pics of Gary's trailer it's hard to determine, it just "sounded" tail heavy. He said it pulls fine, which is good, I hope it does, and that it is safe. As for Bill's trailer here, he has the right idea of putting the heavy object (is that a heater unit?) up front for that tongue weight, provided his Honda is designed to pull it. Is it? That trailer completely empty is probably around 1500 lbs (is that a 6' X 10'?) Not sure what the other stuff in there weighs. Too many variables. But as Brett stated, you should go to a local scale and check it out just to be sure. And you can also purchase a scale for the tongue of your trailer at most trailer dealers.