Excessive play in swing-away tongue

Hi everyone,

Last fall I took my boat trailer in for some warranty work. They ended up replacing a valve for the breaks that's located in the tongue. This summer I noticed that it was making a lot more noise than usual when going over bumps, and I noticed that it was moving up and down quite a bit. I called the local Shore Land'r distributor who came out, inspected things, tightened the bolts up, and said that everything was fine. But the trailer was still noisy, so I just took a look at it today and shot this video:

http://youtu.be/97Qt-fYrgLk

What do you guys think? It has a good 1/2" up-and-down play at the tongue. The bolts are tight enough for it to have much more resistance when pivoting than it ever has, yet it's still doing this. Any thoughts?

Re: Excessive play in swing-away tongue

Them style will have more play as the bolts are the only thing holding the thing together,I like this style better,seem more solid.
Fold-Away Couplers Bolt-On Trailer Coupler | etrailer.com
3rd one down gets ya a look at the hinge.
Grub

Re: Excessive play in swing-away tongue

Bolts wear and holes elongate. That is the draw back to folding tongs.

Re: Excessive play in swing-away tongue

I would move the safety chains to the main tongue. If the coupler gives up, only the wiring and brake line will be holding things together and you will lose the breakaway. And that won't work.

Re: Excessive play in swing-away tongue

MH Hawker said:

Bolts wear and holes elongate. That is the draw back to folding tongs.

Click to expand...

Plate of steel with a new hole is a very easy fix!

Re: Excessive play in swing-away tongue

MH Hawker is correct. You may have accelerated wear because the guys working on the boat may have loosened them and if they were loose with a load it could have smacked back and forth to elongate the holes, but I think it would have happened eventually anyway. You cannot have any clearance with a sheer load like this or it will hammer the holes open.

Couple options for you.
1) Most of the squeak seems like it's from the two plates touching. You can see the rust from where the paint has broken. If you get some nylon, plastic or best teflon sheet and cut it to slip between the steel plates you'd eliminate a lot of the noise. The clunking & movement will still be there though.


2) Go to a steel fabrication shop. 4x4 shop would make short work of this. Drill those holes out 1/8 bigger, then weld thicker plates top and bottom with correct size hole

3) Drill out existing holes to next size up, install said nuts and bolts and keep it tight. Carry wrenches to loose them when you want to swing the tongue.

You will have this issue with the pin-side too, eventually. The only 100% fix is to eliminate the hinge and use two flanges with appropriate-rated bolts. Unbolt and remove the tongue. Again, 4x4 / metal fab shop would be able to do this fairly easily if you're willing to carry two wrenches & lose the convenience. It's a flawed design IMO.

Re: Excessive play in swing-away tongue

Thanks for the replies everyone!

I really like Noltz' ideas on how to take care of this. At this point I still have nearly 3 years left on the trailer warranty; do you guys think that they will see this as a problem and do something about it?

Re: Excessive play in swing-away tongue

Tightening the bolts isn't the answer anyway. Tighten them enough to fix the issue and you will no longer be able to pivot the tongue, kinda defeating the purpose of the swing-away tongue. The design is inferior, IMO. This one appears to be much sturdier: Fulton 34" Bolt-On Fold-Away Hinge Kit - iboats

Re: Excessive play in swing-away tongue

+1 to the Fulton Swing Away Hinge, it worked well and installed somewhat easily on my prior trailer. I used a sawzall with two metal blades and carbide drill bits. That said, you would likely have to cut out your existing welded on hinge which looks like it would shorten your tongue length.




Nolt's suggestions look good, though that dual bolt setup on one side appears to a poor interface, not sure.