Video Transcript for Sherline Trailer Tongue Weight Scale Review

Speaker 1: Today we're gonna be taking a look at Sherline's Trailer Tongue Weight Scale. With a 2,000 pound capacity. Part number 5780. This tongue weight scale is gonna give you the weight, at the tongue, on your trailer to help you decide how to properly load it and whether or not you have too much trailer for your tow vehicle.It measures in both kilograms and pounds for the maximum of 2,000 pounds. Giving you an accurate reading of how much tongue weight you have. It's important to know your tongue weight to verify you're not overloading both your tow vehicle or your hitch.

Overloading your hitch can be dangerous because you can cause a disconnect with the receiver. Overloading your tow vehicle can be dangerous because the suspension is gonna cause your vehicle to lift in the front and drop in the back which can drastically hinder steering and braking performance.this is gonna help you distribute the weight in your trailer. You can move it from front to back to see how much tongue weight you still have to make sure you're not exceeding it but you also wanna keep in mind that you don't want too much weight in the rear or that can cause oscillation. This'll also help you determine if your tow vehicle and the hitch installed on it is gonna be sufficient for your trailer.Here you can see it in action. I'll lower down my trailer by lifting up my jack until all the weight of the trailer is resting on the scale and how jack is no longer touching the ground.

This'll give you an accurate measurement of how much weight is on your tongue. So as you can see here, we're at about 400 pounds tongue weight with an empty trailer. With that unloaded trailer measurement in mind, we're now more prepared to load up our trailer.So now we've got a couple of guys here to help us out so we can distribute that weight in the front and the back and show you how it affects our tongue weight. I've got my guys now standing at the front of the trailer and we can see our tongue weight has gone up drastically. Now I've got my guys slowly walking to the back and we'll see that the tongue weight starts to drop off.

By positioning all of weight at the rear of our trailer, it has actually lowered our tongue weight down drastically by having the weight at the back will cause instability on your trailer.Loading your trailer is all about finding that sweet spot with the load you have on it. I've now got my guys evenly distributed amongst our trailer and you can see our tongue weight is back to where it was when we started unloaded. Now that's not always gonna be the case. The more weight you add to the trailer, the more it can have an impact on your tongue weight, even when properly distributed. But we've added several hundred pounds to our trailer and had very minimal impact on our tongue weight.It's important to keep in mind both the weight of your trailer and the weight of the load that's gonna be on your trailer.

Together they equal your gross trailer weight. Your tongue weight should be 10-15% of what your gross trailer weight is, while these numbers vary slightly depending on your trailer. For single axle trailers, you want a minimum of 10% on your tongue weight to a maximum of 15%. For tandem axle's, you want 9% to 15% and for travel trailers, you want 11-12%.A similar product we sell is Weigh Safe's line of Ball Mounts with Built In Scales. These are always gonna be accurate and they're always gonna be installed in your hitch ready to go. However, there are gonna be significantly more expensive than our Sherline scale.One of our customers, Trailer Guy, wrote in and said, "this is a must have product if you're towing anything. Especially a travel trailer. It's very easy and fun to use. I highly recommend it to everyone. It is well worth the cost for the knowledge and peace of mind and safety. It is small and easy to pack and carry. Tongue weight is very important to safe towing. Don't leave home without one".Now that we've gone over some of the features, we'll show you how to set it up properly. We're gonna begin by using the block method. Now when checking your tongue weight, it's important that add the height of your trailer, roughly what it would be as if it was hooked up to your towed vehicle. And ideally, both your towed vehicle and trailer would be about level when they're hooked up. So that's why we've got our level here. To get the most accurate measurement using your scale, you wanna do this on level ground. Now you notice here we have a large flat area on top of our scale, this will not work so well up inside of our cavity of our tongue here, doesn't even actually fit up in there. But there's a stem included with it that you'll screw inside of it and this'll give you a good point of contact up inside your ball cavity.So here we've got our trailer lifted by its own jack. We'll move some blocks into position underneath of it to help get the correct height that we need. We're using two 4X4's but that may vary depending on your trailer. We're gonna set our scale right on top of these blocks. Now it's important when handling your scale that you hold it by its base. Holding it by the upper portion can cause it to become inaccurate. The lower portion of our base here has a rubber non-skid pad to ensure that it stays in place when taking your measurements. Now with everything in place, we'll raise up our jack, lowering our trailer down onto our scale. We wanna make sure that we have the trailer completely suspended by the scale so all the weight is transferred onto it. With our jack no longer touching the ground, we can get an accurate read out on our scale. You can see our read out of about 400 pounds just like we checked it before.Now if you have access to a floor jack you can use that as well. This is my preferred method because you can lift your trailer up to the same height that it would be as if it was hooked to your towed vehicle, giving you the most accurate measurement. Unlike the wood block method we used that has set distances that it can work at, we have infinite variability in the height we can work with here using our floor jack. Now if you don't have access to a floor jack or wood blocks, you can remove the stem on top, it just unthreads, now you can use your trailers jack on the scale. You may need to use your vehicle to hold your trailer up while you position the scale underneath your jack's leg. Now of the 3 methods for measuring your tongue weight, this one is gonna be the least accurate because we're moving it back, away from our actual ball cavity. Now as you can see here, we're measuring only 300 pounds verses the 400 we had using the other 2 methods. So you can use this to get a rough estimate of your tongue weight for you trip but if you have the option to do the other methods, I would recommend those.That completes our look at Sherline's Trailer Tongue Weight Scale with a 2,000 pound capacity. Part number 5780.