Weight Distribution Installation on a Horse Trailer

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Installation of a Weight Distribution System on a Horse Trailer

Today were going to install a weight distribution, were not using the full kit this time. Whats happened is the same trailer is going to be used by two different trucks. So all were going to do today is install the weight distribution, head assembly, the shank, and the ball while reusing the existing bars. Its pretty much the same as a weight distribution install, were just sharing parts. First thing you want to do is get your truck and trailer on a level piece of concrete. When you get your trailer level, raise the tongue up by about an inch which will compensate for the saggy suspension it will naturally have to begin with. Well measure the trailer now, from the bottom of the coupler to the ground. It looks like we have 14 1/2 inches. Next well measure from the top of the hitch opening to the ground and it looks to be about 20 1/2 inches. With those two measurements you can tell what size you need from the shank assembly. The difference between the two is about 6 1/2 inches, so well go through our chart and well look up the part numbers under trunnion style and it looks like 3215 will fit the bill. Well do a test fit to make sure everything will fit properly. Lets test fit the head assembly. As you can see when its in the straight position, its a little bit higher than the ball but well make up for that with the tilt in the head assembly itself. Also if theres too much tilt, you can always put it back up. A little bit of height is not going to hurt itself because what happens is the spring bars will take up the additional slack. After your fine with your measurement, go ahead and take time out to tighten down the ball.

Once your satisfied you have the right height combination, start to loosely assemble everything and snug it up so it does not move around on you too much. Then well start our precision measurements on the spring bars. Install one of your spring bars and well start on our preliminary ball mount adjustment. The measurements and heights are going to change according to your trailer, in our case well go with what we have here. In our case it shows a difference of 5 1/2 inches from the bottom of the spring bar down to the ground. Well raise that up and then make note of where it sits up here then we know where to tighten this down at. With our preliminary adjustments set, and our top bolts snugged up to keep the head assembly where its supposed to be, well go ahead and torque down the bolts then hook up the trailer and check our progress. Make sure also that the teeth are engaged on those washers just to make sure they dont strip out or mash. Now we can simply just raise up the trailer, put it on the ball, install our spring bars and see what we get. Now once you have the bar on there, what we need to do is latch it, then well raise the trailer again with the truck. That will give us extra room to get the spring bars in and wont require as much strength to snap the brackets into place. Now that we have the truck and the trailer up in the air, go ahead and start on the spring bar. Well put it up on the snap on bracket well start out at about six links. The minimum is five, its always good to have one left over to make for extra room. Considering the fact that were working with an empty trailer, you should do this with a full loaded trailer, but with a horse trailer its kind of hard to do.

Were going to leave an extra link off and we can always make up for the weight when the trailer gets loaded up. Now well repeat for the other side. Now we can lower the truck and trailer to let the spring bars do their work and well check our measurements. Now that we have the hitch carrying all the weight, well compare our original coupler height measurements to what we have now and see how close we got. The original measurement was 14 1/2 inches. It looks like we got right at 15 inches, so technically the spring bars are doing a little too much work now since the trailer is empty. Once we put the horses in there, you can look at it again, re-measure your right amount of links and adjust them or you can adjust with the tilt of the head. If you need more strength, you may have to tilt the head down a little bit, then re-adjust it and try again. This will show you the basics of the weight distribution installed. One other thing you might want to note when youre doing the install, as it says in the instructions that you do want to take into account the sag of the vehicle. That means when the springs settle with the weight on them on this you should have no more than a 1/2 an inch before and after. If you do have more than that you may want to re-adjust the ball mount, probably the tilt more than anything else and the length of the chain. Again very end low capacities also change the amount of how much strength is needed in the weight distribution. Different loads will require different adjustments. Its different every time, with a livestock trailer or a flatbed trailer.

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