Quote:
Originally Posted by Piotrsko
Well, for starters the hitch on the tow car is a piece of flat steel so you can probably flex it by jumping on it and the U for clearing the bumper would make the flex worse, particularly left or right. It's probably a 1500 lb max load hitch.
It only takes about 25 lbs side force on the rear corner to loose control on the freeway and the towed car can probably generate more than that oscillating out of sync. So while you weren't going fast, all that mismatch car movement through the hitch was loading and unloading the rear tires. Another 10- 15 lbs air pressure might help in the rears.
The towed car portion looks ok.
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Thanks for the information. The hitch on the tow car is actually very solid and heavy, it weighs nearly 30 pounds by itself. I can not flex it by any visible amount by standing on it. I believe it is rated for 3000 pounds, but I can't remember for sure as I bought it so long ago. I remember at the time I bought it there were 2 different hitches available and I went with the higher rated one (I believe the lower rated one was 2000 lbs). Either way I don't see the hitch breaking from flat towing a car as there is virtually no tongue weight and I'm sure I would lose traction well before anything broke.
Yeah for some reason the towed car was definitely generating significant sideways forces at times. It actually seemed that letting some air out of the tires helped. I normally have my tow car's tires pumped up to 40 ish PSI for efficiency, but lowering the pressure to 32 ish PSI for more traction while towing seemed to help quite a bit.
Up hills it usually pulled perfectly fine though, I got up to around 60 MPH while climbing several times with no issues at all. I felt like I could have gone even faster on reasonably steep hills, but I didn't risk it.