| RV FEATURE
BALL WEIGHT DEBACLES
THERE IS A DIRECT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HOW YOU LOAD
YOUR RIG AND ITS TOWING STABILITY.
| WORDS: MAX TAYLOR
Fact: how you load your
caravan plays a large part in
its overall towing stability. As
vanners, we are often told to
place heavy items over the
axle/s of the van, and to load
gradually towards the front.
As Collyn Rivers deals
with in this issue and on our
website, GoRV.com.au, it’s
important for towing stability
to have a certain amount of
download weight, though
applying the so-called ’10 per
cent rule’ (loading so that the
ball weight is 10 per cent of
the van’s loaded weight) is not
particularly relevant.
Loading up the rear of the
van also has consequences for
towing stability. To demonstrate
how the placement of heavy
items affects ball weight, we
bought 66kg worth of soil and
carefully loaded the bags onto
the drawbar and measured
the results. We then moved
that weight over the axle,
measured again, and then
loaded the same weight onto
the van’s rear bumper. That
final measurement was very
instructive and conclusively
shows that you can’t load up
the rear of the van without
impacting the ball weight.
A quick note:
we didn’t use a
digital scale (one
is now on our
shopping list), so the ‘weight
on drawbar’ figure isn’t as
pinpoint-accurate as we’d
like, but by how the weight
increments on our scale are
shown we could safely infer an
increase of 60-plus kilograms,
which is what we expected.
THE RESULTS
Ball weight baseline
(unladen): 175kg
Ball weight with load on
the drawbar: Just over
225kg (an increase of
about 60-plus kilos)
Ball weight with load
over the axle: 175kg
Ball weight with load
on the rear bumper:
150kg (a 25kg/14.3
per cent reduction from
the baseline)
14
gorv.com.au