Tongue weight

[bledsoe3]

I've come to a point where I need to make a decision about my battery location. I currently have 95 lb tongue weight. I know putting the battery on the tongue will not overload the tongue weight. But I don't have the outer skin on yet. All of the cabinets are in but nothing in the galley yet either. I'm sure when traveling I will need to store some items inside the TD. I leaning towards putting it on the tongue, but it doesn't hut to ask the experts. What do you think? Front or back?

[angib]

My logic goes like this:

Adding the outer skin will increase the tongue weight by roughly its proportion of the total weight, so add the skin and you're looking at maybe 110lb tongue weight. Put 100lb in the galley and that will go down by maybe 30lb, so that's 80lb.

A battery will weigh 40-60lb (a bit more if you build a fancy box). If you put it on the tongue, about 3/4 of its weight will go on the hitch (the rest on the axle), so that'll put the tongue weight up to 110-125lb. If you put it in the galley, it will reduce the tongue weight by maybe 1/3 of its own weight, so that's a 70-75lb tongue weight.

So if you're towing with a large truck, putting the battery on the tongue would be good. If you're towing with a little sedan, 110-125lb is getting too heavy, so it has to go in the galley.

Andrew

[bledsoe3]

Thanks Andrew. I'm towing with an '04 Outback. It has a maximun tongue weight of 200 and towing capacity of 2000. I think 110-125 is still fine, so I'll put the battery on the tongue. I was suprised at how light the tongue was considering my axle is only 32" from the back.

[angib]

You really need to add in whatever weights you intend to carry to reach a decision - if your usual food supply would be two bags of chips in the galley, but you have a favourite set of lead folding chairs that you'll be putting in the cabin, that would suggest that you might be fighting to get the tongue weight down once your trailer is loaded.

Conversely if you consider 100 cans of food in the galley to be the minimum supply for a weekend's camping and you will have only a helium filled mattress in the cabin, then getting the tongue weight up will be the problem.

I guess this is one place where overbuilding a teardrop would help, as it would reduce the (relative) effect that the loading of the trailer has!

Andrew

[Toolie]

Andrew,

Gee, your good!