ProPride 3P Weight Distribution Hitch w/ Sway Control for 3" Receivers - 14K GTW, 1.4K TW

Video Transcript for ProPride 3P Weight Distribution Hitch with Sway Control Review PR37QR

Dave Hi there, trailer owners. Today, we're gonna be taking a look at ProPride's 3P weight distribution system. This system is available in different weight ratings, so you wanna make sure that you get the appropriate weight rating for the tongue weight on your trailer. The ProPride weight distribution system is based off of the Jim Hensley style. You might have seen those around there, and this gives you a almost complete elimination of sway. So with this thing here, it removes the pivot point here of the ball on your trailer that normally pivots and provides you with this multi-point system here.

What that does for you is with a regular trailer on your ball, if you have any sway events, the trailer sways like this on your ball, and the back of the trailer's moving around. When the trailer's not in a straight line, it puts forces on the vehicle that you're pulling it with, so on your truck here. So if it sways this direction like this, the force is now pushing this way, and that makes your truck wanna go this way. So this way could push you into the other lane of traffic, or if it's this direction, now, your trailer forces are pushing this way, which makes your truck wanna go that way, which could throw you into the ditch. And whenever you have sway that occurs, you can use the wheel in your vehicle to try to compensate for that, but if you overcompensate, it can make the sway even worse and really get the thing outta hand real fast.

It's worse at higher speeds in most cases. So with the ProPride here, we have these multi-point system, so we're not pulling from a center point anymore. We're now pulling from these multiple points, and there are solid metal connections that you can see here. This is our pivot point, and this is kinda where it hooks on the trailer. So these solid points that we've got here means that if the trailer wants to sway this direction, for example, in order for it to go this way, this arm here is solid.

So it can't really go that direction. The attachment over here on this side is also solid, so it can't pull that side. What ends up happening is it pivots the entire trailer, and the trailer stays pretty much in a straight line when any type of like little type of sway occurs. What's nice about that, if the trailer's in a straight line and it moves over because of crosswinds or anything, the force is still going forward on your truck, and it's not gonna cause your truck to want to go into either the left or right direction. It's significantly easier to compensate for it.

And in most cases, you don't even have to do any compensation because with that two-point system, it straightens itself out automatically. Now, before you go to install a ProPride though, there is one thing that I would highly recommend. 'Cause the ProPride, it's main thing is that it almost entirely eliminates sway. It also works as a weight distribution system to help redistribute some of the weight on your truck onto the front axle. But before you wanna put one of these on here, I highly recommend that if you have ore you're battling sway to check your tongue weight. Because if you've got an issue with tongue weight, and your tongue weight's significantly lower than it should be, you can easily get sway, especially at higher speeds. We've got a lot of different tongue weight scales available here at etrailer. And before you go spending money on, you know, trying to just throw parts at it to find the solution for your issue, I would highly recommend picking up a tongue weight scale. You can usually pick 'em up for around the hundred-dollar range. There are so many different ones that vary out there for different features and stuff, so there are definitely more expensive and a little bit cheaper ones out there. But it's definitely worth the investment to get yourself a tongue weight to see what the weight of your trailer is here on the tongue to determine like, "Hey, you know, if my tongue weight's way too low, "I can throw parts at it all day, "but the solution is gonna be "to adjust the tongue weight value." So you can pick those up here at etrailer. I do highly recommend that as your first step for battling sway. Just get that information so you know the appropriate parts that you're gonna need to solve your issues. The weight distribution portion of our 3P hitch is also very easy to adjust. It has a jack-style system here. So a lot of times on your weight distribution systems, the arms that you've got here, you either got some chains that you gotta, you know, pull up or you got some bars you gotta set into place and then pin on. And a lot of times, you can lift up on your truck and trailer a little bit to get those arms on to make it easier, but they do have tools a lot of times that come included with them to help you pry that thing on there. With this system, with the jack setup here, we simply just need to lower our jack stop, and we can easily slide our components together, and then use the jack to raise 'em up. So it's a lot easier on you to make your adjustments with this system than the other weight distribution systems out there. The only downside I see to this system is just how much componentry you have here. It is definitely a more of an install project to put one of these on than it is to put a different weight distribution system on. I will say though, ProPride did do a good job of designing their components to where everything makes sense, and everything just kinda falls together. The biggest part of this install is doing all your setup measurements to make sure everything's gonna fit and where it needs to go. And then, the next biggest part of this is actually just getting a buddy to help you lift some of these heavy parts up. But once you kinda set everything on here, it does really fall together quickly. One of the things that a lot of customers have issues with is connecting and disconnecting the ProPride. It's difficult to do even if you're on flat, level ground. Everything has to be set up perfectly for it to line up and everything. So we're just gonna give you some tips here on how to do that at home. So we've got our truck and trailer here set up, and we've purposely pulled our trailer up onto some blocks of wood here to make sure that it is definitely not sitting level. So our truck is on level ground, but our trailer is tipped up to one side. So we've got our trailer at a nice, poor angle. Now, let's see if we can't get this disconnected and reconnected here. So we've gone ahead and chocked our wheels now. We've made sure our jack is down. We brought it down just until it touches, that's good enough there. So now, we need to bring some tension off of our arms. So we're gonna remove our pin here from our frame jack, or jack frames, whatever, the jacks on the frame. And we're gonna loosen this up some. We're also gonna loosen up the other side, and you can see here our mark, so when we go to reconnect this, we'll be using that mark we made. If you haven't already done so before you loosen your jack, make sure you put that mark there. All right, we went ahead and released the pressure on the jack on the other side as well. And now, we wanna unhook any connections we've got here. So now, ideally, to get this disconnected, we want our truck to be at the same ride height that it would normally sit at when we're not hooked to our trailer. That way, we can just kinda pull straight out. So we're gonna get a tape measure, and we're gonna use our jack to raise our trailer up until the top inside edge of our receiver tube is back to our kind of unloaded factory ride height. So now, we're just gonna raise it up until we hit our mark. Our previous unloaded measurement was right at about 20 1/2. All right, that should put us right about there. Maybe a little bit high. Okay, so we're pretty close there. So we are unhooked from all of our other devices. All that's left is our pieces here. So we're gonna pull the pin out from these. And then, we can use the tool that comes included with our kit here to pop these off of here. And we're just turning this away. There we go. Got both of those popped off of there. So at this point, it's just pull the truck forward. But what you might find is that it might hang up a little bit. That's where you may or may not need to adjust the height of your head here. And sometimes, if you're dealing with an issue where it's the twist of the trailer being different than your truck, you might need to use your jacks to help twist the head a little bit as necessary. So we're gonna just try to pull forward a little bit. We got our wheels all chocked on our trailer and everything. We're just gonna give it a little bit of, put it in gear and just see if she can slide outta there. And if we have to make an adjustment, then we will. All right, so now that we've unhooked it and everything, our trailer's all goofy sitting on that wood there, making it not the same as our truck here. So first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna raise our tongue jack here and make sure that it's the same height as what our truck is when it's unloaded. So we've already adjusted that there. Next, we wanna take a look at the head here. So if we look at the cross of the head here, since we have that side of the trailer angled up, our head's angled this way as well. So we need to try to tilt the head down this way, just a little bit to match ours. We can use the jack on the one side over here to do that. So we're just gonna screw it up a little bit, and you can see right there when we screw it up, we're pulling up on this side and we're going down on that side. And that looks fairly level to the ground. So we're gonna go ahead and bring the truck back now. We'll have an assistant back here helping us line it up. And if they need to, they can adjust our jacks here to change that angle of the head a little bit to get it to pitch properly to match our truck. All right, so we're backing it up here. So there we go. We we're able to get it to couple into there. So we originally had set this to the same height, but that ended up being just a little bit high. And I'm guessing that's most likely because we have this pin in here that pitches us down just a little bit. So you are gonna have to compensate for the pitch angle of your stinger here a little bit. So just probably instead of measuring right here at the top inside edge of your receiver, you'll probably wanna actually set your trailer to the top edge of the stinger here. That'll probably get you a little bit closer due to that tilt angle. But once we've made our small adjustment here, lowering it down to match the tilt angle we got here, it slid right in. And we must have had our side by side, we are loose enough on the one side so it could pivot, but enough pressure on this side, holding it straight for everything to line up. So that all worked out great. We're gonna go ahead now and clip these in. Get a little more pressure on it there. That looks pretty good right there. And then, we'll use the tool that came included with our ProPride. There we go. If it's a little bit too stiff like that, all you need to do is just thread this in about a turn and then retry it. If it's way too loose, you would wanna thread it out. And that's what we want. We want it to be nice and stiff like that. It should be a bit of a challenge to get it to go on there if you're doing it properly. Then, we'll just hook in the other side here. Sometimes, you gotta switch sides just 'cause of the force you need. I like to use my legs a little bit to make it easier to pop that on there. So now, we can put our pins back in. And then, we will adjust our jacks back to where they were. That's why we had made some marks on it there to make it nice and easy on us to do so. After we bring up this side a little bit, we're gonna do the other side. It's just a little bit easy on the system if you're bringing 'em up evenly, and then we'll come back to this side. Now, once you're using your drill and it starts to kinda bog down a little, if you raise up on your trailer some, that'll make it a little bit easier to adjust the bar. So it just takes some of the pressure off of your drill when making the adjustment. See how much easier that was. And we're just gonna bring that right up to where we we're at, and we're gonna match that over on the other side. After making your adjustments, we can insert our pins back in. Make sure to do that on both sides, so it can't un-adjust. And then, it never hurts to just double-check your measurements. This mark, for the most part, this gets you right back where you need to every time, but it never hurts to double-check your measurements on your truck to make sure you do have it adjusted the way you want it. And then, we'll just hook up the rest of our stuff like normal, our safety cables, safety chains, and wiring here. And then, we are good to go. Now, before we install our weight distribution system here, let's get a feeling of how this feels just on our test course. We're gonna go ahead and hit our uneven bumps section here first. And this is gonna simulate like hitting a pothole. And when we hit it right away, this truck's got some pretty stiff suspension. We can feel that definitely right away. It's actually taking this weight fairly well. We don't have a lot of oscillations up and down, but it is fairly stiff, which is probably 'cause this has a stiff suspension system on it. We definitely can feel the back when the back tire goes up, you kinda feel the thud and a little bit of oscillation there, up and down, from the weight of the trailer. But honestly, this truck is doing a fairly good job of handling the weight here. I can feel that the front's a little bit up in the air. And when we hit the, we're on the even bumps section now, when we hit the bump here, we do feel a little bit of a rise in the front, like the weight's in the back. It's kinda tipping us up just a little bit. But overall, I gotta say I'm a little impressed with this Ram here. It does seem to be handling the trailer pretty good. Now, with as big as this trailer is though, and all the crosswinds you get out on the highway, I could see some sway potentially occurring and stuff because of its massive size. So we're gonna go ahead and get into the shop, get our weight distribution system installed, and we're gonna see how this feels. Okay, now before we do hit our test course, a couple of little things I wanted to talk about, so you could kinda keep an eye on this because we got our GoPro set up here, we're gonna be recording our movement here on the test course so you can see the head moving. But it's easier to kind of you get an idea of how the head moves and why it moves the way it does. So we've got your ball hooked up in here, you know, from our hitch box, but it no longer is gonna pivot here on the ball. And the reason why it's not gonna pivot is 'cause this is our new pivot points. You've got one located here, and this is the other end of it here where they pivot. So you got like from here to here, this is a pivot point. And then, this mechanism where it meets over here is a pivot point. So now, there's two pivot points on each side, and that changes how we're pulling our head. Before, we just had a single point. So if sway begins when you're pulling from a single point, it can kinda do that. Now that we've got two points, you know, if you take a string and you put it to like a little car and you we're to pull it from the single point versus pulling it from two corners, the two corners is much more stable, and that's kinda what this is kinda simulating. You've given it kinda that Y-pull to help straighten it out. So the reason why this cannot pivot anymore is part of this mechanism here, if we look at these arms where they go down under our trailer, they meet at the middle of our cross brace here. And that yolk piece that's inside of here is pretty much what prevents the trailer from pivoting on the ball. 'Cause if the trailer wants to turn this way, it has to hit the, that yolk has to hit and it's gonna cause this mechanism to move. And then, of course, you get your standard weight distribution properties from your arms down here to help distribute that weight appropriately. So that's kind of the main anti-sway portion here, and it pretty much eliminates sway. Like I don't wanna say anything's ever a hundred percent, but this is about as close as you're gonna get. So it's really cool by adding the way you're moving from that single pivot point to kinda the multiple, it definitely changes the structure of how it's pulling it. And if you do get like a little tiny bit of sway, it should correct itself very fast because of the way you're pulling it. So one more thing I just wanted to show you, and this is is more just for the next time you go to use your system to unhook or anything, we already took our measurements from here to here. And we made 'em the same side to side. We know our truck is sitting right where we want it. We're gonna take our paint stick here, and we're gonna mark the bottom right here. We're gonna mark the bottom on this side and the bottom on the other side. And this is just a useful thing to have for every time you wanna unhook and hook up. You can just line your mark right back up here on each side. And that way, you don't have to get your measuring tool and all this stuff every time and recheck your truck's ride height. If you set this up to this, it should be the exact same as it is now every time. So we'll mark the other side just so we got that, 'cause we're gonna be doing some unhooking here to talk about this some more, and we wanna be able to recreate this position every time easily. All right, so time to hit the test course here. We're coming up on our course up here, and the first section of our course is going to be the uneven bumps section, and that's gonna simulate like hitting a pothole. All right, and it feels like, it almost feels, kinda feels like there's a little bit more weight in the back with our weight distribution on. And that's in a way kind of a good thing. 'Cause after talking to the customer, this thing had a bit of a sway issue going on, so I went with the ProPride. And I measured his tongue weight, and he is quite below where he should be. Ideally, you're that 10 to 15%. He was closer to about 8%. So a little bit low, might even be a bit less than that. So it feels like we've added some weight back there, and it's stable out the back a little bit. We feel the weight kinda go down in the back now when we hit. Before, it almost felt like it might have been slightly lifting up on our truck when we we're hitting it, you know It was almost like, that's why I thought the suspension, "Man, this truck's got great suspension." I almost don't even feel the weight, and that was mainly 'cause of the tongue weight. So at highway speeds, that would've been much worse on sway and how it feels. We went over the even bumps, and it was a very similar story. It felt pretty much like it did before there, going over the bumps, but it did feel like we had a little bit more weight on the back. Not to where it was bouncing or anything, just felt a little bit more more stable, having a little bit of weight there in the back. All right, so now we've hit our bumps course, we're gonna take this thing out on the road and get it up to a little bit higher speed to see how it feels because our customer was saying he's having issues of around 60-mile an hour with some sway and stuff going on. So we'll see if we've corrected those issues here. So we're gonna hit the highway here. We've got Bob driving, he's gonna drive for us. And we're gonna see how the ProPride handles here. So here we are. Dave's got the ProPride on. We're going down the highway to see how it feels. It's rolling out really good. It feels a lot better. It looks a lot better as far as the tongue height now is level. When he came in, it wasn't level. He was having a lot of problems driving anything over 50 miles an hour. So when we get out on the highway here, we'll try and get it up around 60 or so. All of the weight in the back of the trailer with it being a toy hauler, there's a Harley, a side-by-side, and a generator back there. It was the contributing factor to his sway problems when trucks would pass and the wind. And just getting over 60 miles an hour, he couldn't do that. So we'll see how we go here. So far, it feels great, like no problems. I ain't worried about it. A little bigger trailer than I'm used to, so I'm more worried about just staying in my lane, watching my mirrors. Shoot, I'm already at 60 with no problems. Didn't even realize it. And he said 60 was like a carnival ride. So this is way better than what we had. Getting a little squirrely there. Slow her down a little. Dave There's a sway and I can see it. Yeah. Square it up. So yeah, it is very, very, very touchy this trailer is. Wow. Dave I think it's the tongue weight. If we can . Yep, we gotta get some weight forward on this trailer. This is not gonna work 'cause I'm in the red zone here. So it took weight off, the sway got started, and then as soon as I used the brake controller to apply the trailer brakes and got her slowed down to a speed below 60, she straightened back out. But at that point, at that 60-mile an hour point, you can tell it wasn't gonna straighten out unless you slowed down. And hitting the truck brakes wasn't gonna be the best option in that case. The best option was gonna be to use the brake controller. So we're gonna get thing turned around, get back to the shop, get some tongue weight in the trailer, and then give it another shot 'cause I believe at this point, it's the tongue weight. And we'll check and make sure we got plenty of tension in the spring bars too. Dave All right, due to the extra weight that we've got in the back here, we're gonna correct our tongue weight by moving this small ATV here out of the back, and that should drop off the significant amount of weight here in the back, raising our tongue weight up to a normal amount. Okay, we're back in the truck. We got the side-by-side single seater, I guess it is, out of the truck. I mean, out of the back of the trailer, to give us some more tongue weight, then we're back out on the road to see how we handle. I think our main issue is tongue weight. The ProPride system allowed us to go to do better than what the customer originally experienced, but nothing like what I felt was safe and a quality ride. So here we go. I'll get outta the parking lot here and back on the road, and see what the sway situation is like. So there's 60, and a little wiggle. Yeah, we have a little wiggle. It feels much better. Trailer doesn't look like it's moving near as much. That's good. I do feel that little thump every once in a while from the way that's different back there. What do they call that The yolk's moving. Yeah, the hitch box, the way there's two pieces turning. And every once in a while, when you're in a turn and you kinda straighten out, you do feel a little bump. But that's seldom and only when you're kinda hitting the gas hard. Right now, at 60, it feels good. This is that bump we we're at before, so we'll see how this goes. Going over here, and see if we get squirrely again. That's it right there, and one more right here. Yeah, that was way better. So we get off this ramp here, we'll see how it does maybe going just a little faster. We're basically at 60 there when that happened, a little 59, 60, so we'll get her going a little better than that out here on the highway. Another spot I felt it was right here, over this next little ridge. So we're going a little faster now, 63. We'll see how this little ridge does when we go across it, 'cause we're in a turn and top of the hill. Oh yeah, right over it now. Perfect. And we're at 66. Before, I wouldn't even thought about going 66 miles an hour. So just kinda keep it at 65 here for a minute, and see how it goes. Yeah. Good confidence in it now. Get in front of this truck, I'll do a pretty good lanes change here and see how that goes. I'm gonna change to the right lane. No worries there. Went right in the lane, stayed right behind the truck, didn't come out on either side at all. Now, we're at 70 and just rolling right along. So now, we got a big truck passing us here on the highway and we're doing about 63. Here he comes. I feel him suck me in a little, and I feel me push, feeling pushed me out a little bit. It didn't become a sway incident like the customer was talking about before, so that's awesome. That was much better there than what we we're experiencing earlier and what the customer's been experiencing. So we get the tongue weight straightened out and everything, get all his toys configured properly. This thing will run down the road as fast as he wants. So that should do it. Dave And that completes our look at ProPride's 3P weight distribution system..