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Hi there heavy haulers. Today, we're going to be taking a look at Blue Ox's line of their TrackPro weight distribution systems. These are available in three different weights, depending upon the tongue weight of your trailer. There's an 800, 1,000 and 1300 pound option. As long as you don't exceed that, you're good. So if you have only 500 pounds, the 800 would be fine for you.
They're also available in multiple drop or rise configurations. We're using the standard head here that has seven holes, but there's also a nine hole version. And there's also an 11 hole version. When you're hauling a big heavy trailer like this with a lot of tongue weight, it can cause the back of your truck or whatever you're hauling with to sag down in the back. And that also causes it to lift up in the front.This changes the geometry of your tires, which can cause excessive tire wear.
It can reduce the handling performance of the vehicle because you have less contact between the surface area of the tires and the road. And then that also affects your braking performance because the less surface area means less contact, and the weight's not being distributed properly, because normally, the front brakes do most of the work on your vehicle. And with the weight more on the back, it's not being able to go to that front axle. Last thing, it also helps with correcting your ride height is with your headlights here in the front. When it's raised up in the front, they're pointed up off the road and towards the sky, which reduces your visibility at night.
So I'm putting a weight distribution system on. We can bring our vehicle back to the factory ride height while maintaining a level trailer hauling there in the back. That's going to restore all that loss, braking, and handling performance, as well as get our headlights down, back on the road where we need to see them at night.In addition to correcting all those issues with vehicle ride height, it's also going to act as an anti-sway for your trailer. The beam here that goes down, it kind of acts like a sway bar on your truck. You can see that it's pressed against this and also here at the top.
So whenever the trailer wants to sway, this bar then has to flex. If this side's lifting up, it's hitting onto this piece here, giving it flex on this arm to help pull it back down. And vice versa, if it goes this way, the bottom being here, it's this bar is pushing against this, bringing our trailer back up. And the bars on each side, work together to help keep our trailer from swaying as much as it used to, and also minimizing how much oscillation back and forth that it has. And I really noticed a big difference in comparison with no weight distribution system and when installing it out on our test course.And you're going to get a lot more benefit out of a solid connection like this with a solid beam and solid points here at the back, because the other styles that you often see uses a chain to hook it up, which works great for the weight distribution portions, leveling out your truck. But as far as way, it doesn't do nearly as much as this. Because with those chain styles, if you lift up on this side, you're going to get slack in the chain and it's really not doing anything. It's only affecting the side when it dips down, because the chain can't stretch. So the bar kind of help a little bit with sway with those. But with this, we've got assistance both sides, up and down, which is a lot more sway control in those chain styles.And I really liked the way this system installs. There's no drilling required. It simply clamps around your frame. And a lot of the other styles that require you to drill holes and use self-tappers to get things mounted up, and if you accidentally drill it a little too large, or while the hole out, you have issues getting those things mounted up. So being able to clamp it on really makes things easy. And it also makes it really easy to make some subtle adjustments after you've got it installed. If things don't quite line up the way you want it to, with the other styles, you've already drilled the holes and placed it there, oh no, that's that. With this style, we can easily just loosen these up and make those subtle adjustments.And as someone that installs these components, this is one of my favorite parts. There's no adjustments here at the head. And if you've ever worked with any other weight distribution system, often you've got washers and things you need to stack up in here to help assist you with the adjustment at the trailer side. And boy, if you have to make adjustments here, you got to take everything back off, unhook the trailer, then you got to take the head and disassemble it to make those adjustments, put it back together, and then find out whether or not it's going to work. And if it doesn't, you got to repeat that process.But with this style, we just got to set up the height of our ball to match a level trailer whenever we're going to be hauling. And that's it. Torque it down and we're good to go. All the adjustments are done on the trailer side. All of your adjustments are going to be made right here. You'll have different mounting holes. So we've currently got it in the least amount of assistance from our weight distribution system. And that happened to be perfect for our particular set up here. But if you needed more assistance, more tension on your bars to help raise up your vehicle more, you can simply loosen these bolts up right here, these two nuts, slide this off, move it up a notch and put it back on.Now, you do have to take the arm off. What's cool about this is unlike like those other systems where you usually have to unhook the whole trailer from the truck, you can leave your truck connected. Just use your jack to lift up the truck a little bit so you can easily get the arm off, adjust this, and then just slide it back on. It's so much faster. Another thing that I really like about this with it being a no-drill application, it's extremely easy to move this to another trailer. If the one you've got here just isn't meeting your needs anymore and you've got yourself a nice new one, bring this bad boy on over, and you're ready to enjoy all the benefits of it with that new trailer.We're currently using the standard receiver here and we've got it in the lowest position, which puts our ball pretty close to being even with the top inside edge of the receiver. If you needed additional adjustment, there are other receivers available here with more holes. Each hole is going to be about an inch and a quarter apart. So if we we're to move this up to another hole, it would bring our hitch ball up an inch and a quarter.Now that we've gone over some of the features at the trailer, why don't you hop in the truck with me and let's take it for a ride so we can see the difference I did drive it beforehand and it felt like it was an awful lot of trailer for this truck. There was a lot of up and down motion and sway going on, and I could see where it's pretty uncomfortable driving it with how it was. Now that we've got it hooked up, we're going to see. All right, we're going over our bumps section now. And I could already tell a huge difference on how much up and down motion we had in the back. It's not completely eliminated, but boy is it significantly reduced. And we're going to go into the uneven bump section and this is going to simulate sway, and we don't really feel it much here in the truck. But when we look back at the trailer, there's significantly less sway before and how many oscillations we had before.And lastly, we're going to head into a slalom section, and this is going to simulate our evasive maneuvers. And this is where I noticed the biggest difference. Before when we went into the slalom section, boy, it just really felt like that was a lot of weight back there throwing us around. You could really feel the trailer start to sway. So as we went back and forth, it got worse and worse. We're heading up to our section now. So we can, once again, see how it's going to react. Get a little bit more speed in there. Because I already feel more confident after going over the test scores. And here we go. And oh man, I mean it's night and day difference. It almost doesn't even feel like we have a trailer back there. Obviously, we do. And we can feel when we hit the bumps, but as far as evasive maneuvers, wow, does it feel great.So I actually just got done with our slalom section there and boy, did it feel great. I had a lot of confidence here behind the wheel. The trailer barely felt like it was swaying or moving me. And if somebody we're to stop quick in front of me and I needed to make a quick maneuver, I would have plenty of confidence doing so. Beforehand, I probably just would've slammed on my brakes because I wouldn't have risked making that maneuver because I would suspect it would not have went so smoothly. To help you get the proper tension adjustment on your truck and trailer, I highly recommend the BetterWeigh system. It's a great little electronic device that'll plug into the data link connector, the OBD two port underneath the dash on your vehicle. It can not only measure your tongue weight, but it can use that tongue weight measurements to help you get the perfect set up here.And we've got it all dialed in. Now, we use the BetterWeigh and you can see all of our marks here are right around green. Now that we've gone over some of the features, why don't you follow along with me in the shop and we'll show you how to get it installed We'll begin our installation by first checking our trailer to see that everything's going to fit properly. Regardless of which kit that you purchased, the trailer side is going to be exactly the same. And for the most part over here, it's going to be pretty much the same too. The first thing we did was level our trailer. So we've got our trailer now level and we want to measure the height for our ball. And it's right at about 18 inches. Once you've got that measurement, we're going to head over here now to our pitch.I've already took the shank and slid it in and secured it with the included 5/8 inch pin. But before we secure the head, we need to know how high we want it to be. And we want it to be as close to our trailer as possible. And we can go above it, but we don't want to go below it. Above it, we can go about an inch above it. To give you an idea of which one you're going to want to purchase, in the lowest hole here, the top of our ball's going to be about level with the top of your shank. So just measure from the ground to the top inside edge of your receiver. And that's going to give you the lowest height that this one is going to be able to adjust to. So if you need to go lower, you want to make sure you purchase the one that has a lower adjustment.So now that we know what the height that we want, we can go ahead and secure the ball on the side. So we're going to put a lock washer on the other side of our bolts, and then we're just going to run our nuts down on there. We'll then tighten them down with a 1 1/8 eighth inch socket and wrench. One of the things you do want to pay attention to is the ball size, it does come with a two and five sixteenths ball preassembled on it. You don't have to do anything there. If you do have a different ball size you need, you will have to swap it out yourself. The shank inside is a 1 1/4 inch. It does also come with a sleeve so you can adapt it down to a one inch shank. And then we're just going to snug these guys down and then torque them to the specifications which are found in our instructions.The vehicle side down, we're going to come over and finish up the trailer side. I've already installed the driver's side here. So let's head over to the passenger side and I'll show you how I got it put on. Now back on our trailer, we're going to start at our ball. I've gone ahead and marked the center line all the way across, because we're going to be using the center of the ball to determine where to place these. So from the center, we're going to measure back 20 inches and we're going to make a Mark there. And then we're also going to make a market 25 inches. Our plate needs to be installed in between these marks. On the other side, I placed it as far back as I could against the 25 inch mark to clear our propane tanks. And if you have any items here that's going to be in the way from these measurements after you make them, you're going to need to move those.I did have to scoot this forward just a little bit in order to get the clearance I needed over on that side. Any holes you see here are components I had to move out of the way. Our bracket here is going to be placed between these two. Our top slot here, we're going to take the long bolts that we get. Slide it through the top. And on the other side, we're going to take our bracket here and we're going to slide it on. We want to make sure we don't pinch any of our wiring if you have any there between our brackets. And we also need to make sure that this is facing forward towards the front of the vehicle. Now, before we bolt this on there, these holes here, we need to slide our bolts through. So you'll see those couple of slots there.So we're just going to slide the shorter bolts that come in our kit through those holes. And we can just drop this guy right back down on top. We'll then secure it on bottom with another bolt. Try to get as close to your frame as possible. So that way, it's clamped right around it. You can see here that we made sure we didn't pinch our wiring. And we're just going to use a nylon locking nut to secure each one. We want it to still stay loose at this time so we can make the adjustments to make sure that everything's going to clear. So depending on your trailer, if you have ample room with nothing in the way, you can go ahead and snug these down, but we have a tight clearance here. So we're going to take the bracket, the L bracket here, and this has multiple adjustments.You see the holes here, and this is what helps you change the tension for your weight distribution system. Lower is going to be less tension, higher is going to be more tension. And we want to make sure that we can adjust it however we need to, because we don't know if the customer, or if you're going to add more weight or anything like that, and you may need more attention later on down the road. So we're going to go ahead and just slide this guy on there. And we can see that we're going to clear our propane tanks there and we're right up against that back mark there.So that's really what we wanted to do just to make sure that was good. We don't need to secure this yet. We're actually ready to tighten down these bolts. And it's not a bad idea if you have such a tight clearance like we do, to leave this on here, you can even take a nylon locking nut just to make sure it's not going to fall off on you. And this way you can ensure it's going to clear once tightened down. We'll then take our three quarter inch socket and wrench. We're just going to hold this guy so it's as vertical as possible. We're going to hold our nut or bolt with the wrench and then tighten down the other side with our socket. Trying to make sure everything is even in level as possible there. Make sure everything's clear. There we go.Once you get a little tension on that one, we're going to come down to the bottom and we'll just tighten this one down. Make sure they're snug where they can't move on you. And at this point, now we can choose the location we want our attention to be in. We're going to start in the lowest position with the least amount of tension. And the reason we're so far down is because our truck did dip down some, but not a whole lot. And we want to be level at the end. So we set up our ball and our coupler height to achieve levelness. But as we put more tension on our bar, that's going to raise our truck up some. So we're going to have to compromise in the middle with a nice level trailer and also a nice ride height.And depending on how far your truck was sagging down, you may want to give it more tension. More tension is going to raise it up higher. Since ours doesn't need much, we're going to start all the way down. And it's not a bad idea to start all the way down and then go from there. So you can get an idea. Because it's as simple as taking these bolts out and moving it up. Same size socket. We'll tighten these down. These just tightened down until they're snug. There's no torque specs in your instructions. This guy, I'm just going to drop it in here so I don't lose it. We're going to be using it at a later step.We're then just going to measure at the front and back on our fender well from the ground up. Here at the back, we got 36, and then in the front we're going to remeasure. And we've got 34 and 1/4. We'll be using those to assist us with achieving as close to factory ride, height and level trailer as possible. Returning to our factory ride height is going to restore loss, braking, and handling performance. So the closer we can get to that, it's going to give us the best towing possible.We can now hook our trailer back up. And we're going to ensure that we've got all the weight of our trailer on our ball and that we're coupler coupled. And then we're just going to recheck those measurements to see how much difference we're going to make. I've gone ahead and retaken the measurements. And we dropped down here in the back about an inch, and we raised up in the front almost a half an inch. Weight distribution it's going to allow us to bring the back up and help restore it back to that factory ride height, which is not only going to, again, restore that braking and handling performance. But it's also going to take our headlights that are pointed up a little bit towards the sky and bring those back down to the road, making it easier to see at night.We can now take our bars and we're going to be inserting them. You want to make sure that the lines here are faced up. And these actually indicate how much support you're going to get with your system. We have three lines, which is for our 1000 pound system. If you had two lines, it would be for the 800 pound. And if you had four lines, that would be for the largest, our 1300 pound. So there's also a hole drilled in the side here and a hole here. We're going to slide this in, lining those holes up, and secure it with the included pins. Can be a little tricky because it is a pretty snug fit.inaudible 00:16:47 it down. And we can then see if we can get the bar on, which right now we're not going to be able to. And that's pretty normal that you're not going to be able to lift this up by hand. So we'll take these pins out now, they we're just sitting there because that's, what's going to hold our bar on. Now, we can't lift it by hand. It does come with a tool, but due to us being so close to the ground on this particular set up, we really can't get the tool in how we need it, but that's okay. You can use your jack to assist you.And if we lift up on our trailer, it actually will help relieve some of that tension, making it easier to get our bars into place. Now that we've lifted up on our jack, you can see here that I can almost get it on there just by hand, but we're going to use the tool that comes included with it because it's going to be a lot easier. Just slides under, this hooks in the little notch there. And then you just lift up and work it in place. We'll then secure it by dropping our pin back down and securing it with the clip. We'll then repeat this over on the other side.And don't forget that you did raise it up with your jack if you had to. So you want to lower that back down. We'll now recheck our measurements. I've already taken them and we've returned right back to factory ride height with our lowest setting. It raised us back up that inch that we lost, returning to the 36 and it dropped us back down a half inch in the front, returning us to that factory 34 and 1/4. And we also put our level on it here, and we can see that we're pretty level. We are slightly up in the front, but that's really what we're kind of looking for. We either want to be perfectly level or slightly up in the front. We really don't want to be sagging down in the front. So we're pretty optimal on our set up right now.If you we're not level or your truck needs to go up more, you can loosen these up, raise this up another notch or two, depending on how much you need, and then reinstall the bar. Now, the bars are going to be more difficult to install the further this is up. So you may need to use more jack power, and it's okay to use your jack to actually start lifting up a little bit on the back end of your truck, to give you a little bit more play on this, to make it easier to get it on. The included tool really does make it easy though. So you don't have to use your jack as much as you would with a lot of other wage distribution systems. Now that we've got it fully installed and all of our measurements look great, our truck's at factory ride height, our trailer's level. We're going to go take it for a spin and make sure everything feels okay.It's pretty normal for you to hear a little bit of noise coming from this, because as you turn, these bars are going to slide on here. And it's also important that you have at least four inches sticking out past our L bracket here, which as long as you're in those marks that we talked about before, you most likely will be. But if you do not have four inches here, it's possible that when making a turning maneuver, the end of the bar here could pop off because if we go to make a right turn, this bar is going to get shorter. It's going to go this way because the trucks going that way, and the other one's going to get longer and stick out further. And vice versa if you turn in the other direction. If you don't have at least four inches here, then you would just need to adjust this further forward.While we're here, I wanted to talk about maintenance as well. I've gone ahead and removed the arms from our trailer. It's still hooked here on the ball, but I wanted to point out here that you can see that there are a grease circs in our arms. I'm already greased the one over there on the passenger side. You can see on this side, the arm is still in it. You can swing it towards your truck in most cases to be able to access it from this direction. If you wanted to remove the bar completely, then you can easily access it from the outside. And we're going to go ahead and grease this one. It doesn't take very much grease, maybe one or two pumps just until you start to see it. And this is just going to help extend the life of these components and also reduce noise.And we can see it coming out to both the top and the bottom there. So that's really all we need. We can just pull our grease fitting off of that here. And then you can wipe away any excess just to help minimize any mess of things flinging around, getting on other components. And then we can re-install our system. Another component that you can maintain is the ball. You can grease your ball as well to ensure a good pivot inside of here. That'll also help extend the life of these components. And that completes our look at Blue Ox's line of their TrackPro weight distribution systems.
Hello I have a question between the swaypro and the trackpro wichone is better? thanks
While the SwayPro is definitely a proven weight distribution system (WDS), I think the newer TrackPro will handle sway better simply because it uses bars instead of the chains.
@JonG I currently have the swaypro system. Is my swaypro hitch head compatible with the trackpro system, or is the trackpro head a different design. I would like to just upgrade the bars and brackets if possible.
@CaseyE I called Blue Ox to double check, and no, the heads are not the same. If you want to go from the SwayPro to the TrackPro, you will need to buy the entire system as the components are not interchangeable.
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