by Tow Itch on Mon 05 Sep 2011, 6:16 pm
mike wrote: Ali wrote:what is a 'nose weight'

and what does it have to do with trailer weight??
Nose weight is the weight being applied to the tow ball by your trailer when its loaded and hooked up,you can check it by putting a piece of wood under your trailer tow hitch and balancing it on bathroom scales,care should be taken as it will be unstable while doing this and it should be sat at the same height as it is when hooked on the car.
Your cars handbook will show a max nose weight for your car,you then take
17% of the loaded dandy weight and which ever is the lowest is your trailer nose weight,you correct this weight by moving stuff around inside the dandy,i cant see a problem if you are a little bit out but without checking you could be as much as 20 kg out.In some ways the dandy six berths are easier to set up because of where you store the roof can change the nose weight.
mike
Mike
Noseweight gone up a bit is this the noseweight for Gerard Depardieu? 17%
Split opinions on front boxes.
They're
1/
2 the way in from the wheels (With the exception of the 6) so the CofG of anything loaded is at worst
2/
3rds the way along. So if the box has a mass of 5Kg a couple of gas cylinders and a battery 25Kg from a total mass of 30Kg you are still only adding to the noseweight by 20Kg. (Like a lever 20Kg at the nose 6ft from the wheel lifts 30Kg 4ft from the wheel)
You balance this against the wisdom of storing the gas and battery in the middle of a folded Dandy.
Yet if anything goes wrong you have put your heaviest items about as far out as you can get from the axle.
So you then have a 30Kg pendulum acting if things get unstable.
To be honest though the Dandy is so small and balanced I wouldn't think twice, though if you have really loaded things up putting all your other weight at the back end to give a balanced noseweight it is beginning to invite trouble.
I can see why my old large trailer tent got a bit squirrelly at times.
For all you heavy packers remember the noseweight is not not considered part of the trailers mass (Traffic regulation terms not mine. At least my sentence with both mass and weight in it used the terms in their proper place.{Mass is a scaler quantity. Weight is a vector it is an applied force})
So a 535Kg Designer with 35Kg on the noseweight is bang on at 500Kg. Not that this is the sort of level of overloading that invites prosecution.
This touches on noseweight a bit.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Kevin.