towing the R pod 189 - Event Date: 18 Dec 2021

Hello all. 

I think you are going to get a yes to that question and I agree. I noticed your hitch weight empty is a little lite I would not load to much in the back of your camper make sure you have enough hitch weight. You should have at least 10% of your trailer weight for your hitch weight. A three thousand pound trailer should have at least 300 pound hitch weight. If you have to little hitch weight that will cause the trailer to easily sway. A sway control will provide more safety from sway and easier to tow less rocking up and down on your hitch. You need to know the specifications of your ranger as to what it can safely tow including maximum hitch weight and weight of trailer being towed and too need to include front wind load of camper how much wind resistance you have.

Ignore the listed empty weights, they have little to nothing to do with actual loaded weights. They are, sadly, created by the trailer marketing folks to sell more trailers, not to guide people to tow safely and within your tow vehicle specs.

So first, load up your trailer with everything you plan to have in it while camping including wate, eztra batters and propane for boondocking if that's your use case. Do the same with your tow vehicle including all passengers, the family dog, generators, coolers, tools, lounge chairs, full fuel, everything.

Then, without a weight distribution hitch, drive very carefully to a public scale and get weights on each of your 3 axles. You can roll one axle at a time onto the scales and use subtraction to get the weights. Disconnect the trailer and go back through the sales a second time with just the tow vehicle and all the same gear and people on board. Get weights of each axle again.

Now go home. Look at your TV door sticker and trailer sticker and right down all the max allowable weights you see there. The max tongue weight might be in the TV owners manual. Also get the TV wheelbase from your specs, and get the distance from the rear TV axle to the ball and distance from the back to the trailer axle w
to the ball with a tape measure.


Armed with this data sit down at your computer and bring up the towing calculator linked below. Put all your data in and look at the dual gauges and see if you are out of spec anywhere.

Your tongue weight is the difference between the combined weight of the two TV axles with the trailer and without the trailer. Your tongue weight also needs to be at least 10% of total trailer weight to avoid sway, preferably 11%.

Jf you are you outside any if these limits you will need to leave some stuff or the family dog (or kids) at home, or maybe just redistribute the weight if that works. Many people self included, like some additional headroom between our max numbers and the actual ones. How much is up to you. I want at least 10%.

Generally, but not always, moving
weight more forwards in the trailer and tow vehicle is better. Do not tow if your rig is out if spec, it's unsafe and illegal.

Note that adding a WDH doesn't bring you into spec if you weren't to start with. It does help get load redistributed to the front axle, which gets lighter, not heavier, when you hang the trailer on the TV. That helps 3 ways:

Headlights less likely to blind other drivers.

Better handling with more weight on the steering wheels

Better braking because your front a brakes are the best ones on your rig.

So by all means get a WDH, but only after you have confirmed that you have a rig that can be operated within specs.

The towing calculator will help you know how to set up the WDH. You will need to put it in your receiver and re-measure the new ball distance from the TV axle, and add it's weight to the TV weight. The objective is to tension the WDH until the weight on the front axle is back to what it was without the trailer. You can do that by changing the WDH tension level in the calculator.

I know this sounds like a lot of work and it is, you will spend a couple of hours doing this, but it's worth it to know youre towing safely.


Towing calculator

  offgrid gave a excellent explanation of loading your camper and tow vehicle don't let it all be to over whelming once you have it understood it's easier each time you go camping. Have a fun time camping and drive carefully.