Oregon State Beavers Shin Shield for 1-1/4" and 2" Ball Mounts

Video Transcript for Sisikiyou Ball Mount Shin Shield Review

Hi there hollers. Today we're gonna be taking a look at Siskiyou Shin Guard. This will work with either a one and a quarter or two inch draw bar. Oh, Hey Dustin! And if anything like that's ever happened to you you can understand why you'd need something like this. This is gonna protect your shins when you walk by so if you do have a little accidental bump, it's not going to reverberate up your leg and drop you to the ground saying some things you wouldn't say in front of your mother. And this is what it looks like when it's installed.

It'll work on any of your one and a quarter or two inch draw bars. You simply install it in between your ball and your drawbar and that'll hold it in place and give you a nice protective barrier all around the back so you won't have any incidents like I just had. Additionally, you can display your favorite sports team, whether they're professional or college on the back. We have these in all different kinds of logos. So go beavers.

And you can see here it extends down below so it'll even cover up your ball shank here at the bottom. And this has really nice protection, especially if you're a guy who likes to work at home on your own stuff. You're rolling around and boy if you ever hit your head on one of these it's even worse than your shin. So it's nice that it's got that protection from the bottom as well. The entire thing is a nice thick, rubber material around it and it's very soft.

You can see here when I squish it, it feels very nice and I tell you the pain is just not even there with this on. Really does do a great job in dampening any impact that happens to collide with it. And since this is installed underneath of our ball here it doesn't affect coupling to our trailer whatsoever. We're still gonna have the full length of the ball sticking out top so we can still couple it just as easily as we could with anything else. Now you do wanna keep in mind that when you install this, there are a few stipulations.

The ball can only have up to a one inch shank so you can't use a one and a quarter or larger the washer here is not really designed for it. And it does also add a little bit of thickness between your drawbar and your ball there. So you may wanna consider a slightly longer shank on your ball if you're planning on buying one here. Check your existing ball if you're going to use one and see how many threads you've got sticking out. I would say between the thickness of the plastic here and the washer you've got about an extra quarter inch of thickness here that you'll need to take up. So just make sure that you do have a few threads sticking through on the bottom after this is installed. So just check that out prior to ordering it to make sure you've got it. If you don't have the length you need we've got plenty of balls here at each trailer so you can get one that's rated properly for what you're going to haul. The Shin Guard does have a weight rating of 1700 pounds for it's tongue weight and 17,000 pounds for its gross towing capacity. But since it's tops out at a one inch ball for the shank size, the one inch balls typically don't ever reach that high of ratings so really the weight ratings on this are kind of negligible because it's never gonna- the ball is never gonna get as high as the shin guard. To get it installed you will have to slide it over your drawbar before installing your ball. So if you already are planning on using that one you've got preassembled you will need to remove the ball from it. So the best time to do it would be if you're assembling a new drawbar and ball you can do it right now at this point. So we've got those separated. We're gonna take the collar here and this actually just slides over the end. The ball would then slide through and you wanna pick the correct orientation. But there's a washer that needs to go on here beforehand that would go in between these two pieces. And I wanna show you that washer here because we do have to do just something small to it and it just depends on your ball on the size of your ball. The shank varies depending on the weight rating of your ball. So the higher it can carry the thicker the shank is gonna be here. So you can see that it's currently not gonna fit on this ball, but we can take this little section here it's already been kind of perforated so we can just knock this out. So we're gonna do this by just taking a larger socket that the insert in the middle will fall down into. And then we're just gonna grab another socket that's a similar size as the inner ring. We'll just align those up and then we'll just give it a little knock to drive that out. So you can see the center of our ring pops right out there so we can toss that aside we don't need it. That's gonna slide over our ball and then we'll take our assembly here. We're going to slide it in position just like that on the bottom side we'll place our washer and our nut. These two came included with the ball. And at this point we just need to retorque or if this is the first time you're installing it torque your ball to the manufacturer's specifications. Those are going to vary and typically they vary depending on the size of your shank. So make sure that you are torquing it to the appropriate spec for your ball. And I like to do it like this with the ball and the vice so I can hold on to the drawbar just so I can line it up. It doesn't have to be lined up in any particular way. I just think it has a nicer finishing look if everything's just straight in line and the flat spots on the ball going down with your draw bar. All right. Now that we've got it fully torqued down at this point, we're ready to install this in our hitch and hook it up and we're ready to go. And if we park our truck in the garage we can leave this in the hitch and our shins are protected whenever we walk by. And that completes our look at Siskiyou Shin Guard..