The Trike trailer that Ironhorse Trailers offers weighs in at 950 pounds empty with 80 pounds of empty tongue weight. It will fit most any trike except a few of the custom length ones. Being light weight and aerodynamic is just a few of the features that makes it one of the best motorcycle trailers made. The flip top design is second to none and they have a four year warranty. Not many box trailers have that. They come standard with a 3500 pound axle with electric brakes and a break away safety system. Aluminum frame, fiberglass body, wheel chock, D-rings, LED Lighting, Aluminum wheels, Gel-coat finish for low maintenance. One of the best things is you do not have to have a 3/4 ton vehicle to pull them and they do not kill your gas mileage. Most people forget they are behind them. Give their website another look as they have revamped a few things. 16 years in the business of making nothing but motorcycle trailers, they must be doing something right. www.ironhorsetrailers.com
Lots of good advice on this. I added a receptacle box with prong insert to the A-Frame and fed it through conduit to a traditional box inside. I chose a Legend Low Rider V-Nose 12 x 6-1/2 wide trailer so it can be towed with smaller SUV or my truck without mirror extensions. Room to walk around Tri Glide. Can also store it in garage with 7' door.
Since this bounced back up, I should do an update. It might be helpful.
Got everything installed, did a dry run, loaded it all up the afternoon before leaving and took it over to the local elevator and had them weigh it.; no charge, since I wasn't using the weight for anything official, and they were curious, too.
We'd packed stuff in the trailer to as to put about half of the added weight on the tongue and half on the front trailer axle. The objective was to get 10-13% of the total weight on the tongue. We also put some of the heavier stuff in the passenger footwells of the Jeep, tools, water, cooler, suitcases above those, more on that later.
It turned out with a total weight of the Jeep and fully loaded trailer at 8880 pounds. the trailer itself was 3700#, and with the tongue on the Jeep, off the scale, the tandem axles were at 3300#, so a tongue weight of right around 400#. So 5100# for the Jeep. I got 10.8% of the weight on the tongue, which met the minimum. All that is plus or minus 20 pounds as it is a 60 foot long scale for heavily loaded farm vehicles and we did everything on one end.
The Jeep manual recommends using a weight distributing hitch (WDH) with any hitch weight over 350#, which we're over slightly, but that assumes some things like it's a single axle trailer, with general loading (not a trike on the floor and nothing high up, and nothing shifting around) that the Jeep is at it's max weight and some other things.
Part of the concern is the weight in the rear unloading the front wheels of the vehicle, hence our loading of the heavier things in the passenger footwells, forward of the rear axle. We put only light stuff in the back end of the Jeep. But it's something to consider. If there was any sign of instability we were going to go back and stop at a camping store and get a WDH installed.
One additional thing we found out; they guy that sold us the trailer had the hitch height so that the front of the trailer was about 1" higher than the back, saying "It'll level out once you get the tongue weight on the vehicle." Well . . . Except that the Jeep has automatic ride height control!!! I didn't know that. So we hooked it up, and in a few miles it was back to the same height. I think I need hitch dropped another inch, it would help mileage and maybe be even more stable.
Moral of the story; download your vehicle build sheet from the manufacturer's website, it has all the features you may need to know about. All you need is your VIN. The Jeep not only has ride height control, but an anti-sway feature that engages when a trailer is hooked up, and a brake ratio control, too.
So the results? It pulled really well! No lightness in the front, no sagging in the rear, no wandering or hunting, no bucking, no side-to-side rocking, no hitch banging around, no uneasy feelings at all! Yes, you could tell it was definitely there, especially with gas mileage, and it accelerated a little bit slower, but overall I'm very pleased with it.
The only instability was passing a car carrier at 70mph, where if you were at it's rear quarter and stayed there, you could feel it buffeting side to side a bit (the wife found this out, scared her at first; a few reassuring words and a little acceleration and all her fears went away. She used to tow a horse trailer about three times this weight, so no problem.) Not staying there avoided it. Only with car carriers, they must make some very "dirty" air.
Oh, mileage. Ha!!! Well, not so good, normally it gets about 24mpg, it dropped to anywhere from 12 at 70mph in the hills to 15 at 55 when flat.
And brakes; setting up the brake controller I installed was easy, one setting for the empty trailer, one for it loaded. The vehicle isn't stopping the trailer much at any time, and the trailer isn't stopping the vehicle much at any given time. We didn't have any panic stops to see how that worked, although in the first 50 miles I did a bit of aggressive braking to test it, and to settle everything down in the trailer and make sure nothing was moving around.
Overall, with about 2700 miles on the combo (plus 900 miles without the trailer,) we were well pleased with the results. Now if only it wasn't such a cold January in the south! The coldest in 40 years, supposedly, and it was supposed to continue. So instead of going to New Orleans, we opted to head on over to Daytona where it was warm, and for Speed Week. Instead of riding 6 or 7 cold trips in 4 weeks for about 600 miles in 'Bama, we got in another thousand miles in three weeks at 80 degrees, riding every single day except one! Had a great time in both places, though, glad we did the trip.
Hopefully this may help someone else considering things.
02-20-2018, 03:07 PM
