When you have a vehicle that can haul a trailer you’ve given yourself a fantastic advantage on the road or trails over other vehicles that don’t have the ability to pull a trailer behind them. This means you can help move your friend’s stuff with just your truck, bring home a load of materials for the weekend project or take extra gear that you need with you when camping to the campsite. This also gives you the ability to pull a trailer with a boat on it or a couple jet skis, but those items aren’t the subject of this article so we’ll leave them out of the conversation.
Regardless of whether you’re driving a Toyota Tacoma or a GMC Sierra 2500, the challenge when you use a trailer with your vehicle is finding the right balance inside your trailer to make sure you can take your gear along with you. The right gear makes the difference in your experience whenever you head out to the wilderness. While choosing your gear could mean you have to make some tough choices, an even more difficult part of the travelling with a trailer is loading it correctly. Many people are unaware of how important weight distribution is and feel they can just put the weight in the trailer however they want to, but you should know differently.
A video demonstration of what happens when trailer loads are done incorrectly is linked below. In this video we learn how much more an improperly loaded trailer can cause your vehicle to fishtail and go out of control. This isn’t just important for your off road adventures, but if you use a trailer to move from one city to another you want to make sure the load is right to ensure you can pull the trailer and enjoy the ride without any interruption in the drive.
Here’s the rule you need to know when it comes to loading a trailer. Your trailer should always have the bulk of the weight toward the front and not to the rear. The reason for this is that a trailer can feel like an extension of your vehicle if the bulk of the weight is in the nose of the trailer. This allows you to keep it under control more easily than you would if you loaded it in reverse. If you load a trailer with a majority of the weight to the rear, the trailer can turn into an uncontrollable object with the weight separated more from your vehicle than when it’s in the nose.
Not only do you want the heavy stuff up front when you take off or brake it will ride much easier and you won’t have as much shifting if the weight is up front. U-Haul recommends a 60/40 front/back split of the weight to ensure you have a good distribution and a majority of the weight near the front. Now that you know how to load the trailer, you can head over to your friend’s house and help them load up and move to their new home in your vehicle that’s made for towing.
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