On Monday, August 15, 2016 at 1:01:57 PM UTC-7, wrote:
My failure was at the actual hitch not the tongue. I had two failures actually, one with the original hitch from Cobra and the second on a replacement hitch from autozone. the euro hitch has one vertical and one horizontal bolt, the replacement had two horizontal and one vertical bolts I had to use one of the vertical bolt holes away from the tow vehicle and drill the horizontal hole in a different location to make it fit the failure was in the vertical bolt hole, and the hitch " ripped" the metal away. Luckily the horizontal one held. My latest design, I doubled the hitch plate with 1/8" steel "U" channel and drilled out to match the tongue. 1/2" bolts still one vertical one horizontal and so far so good.

Sometimes what happens is a design fails and you strengthen the failed part, only to discover that the next weakest part of the design fails. This is the epitome of a "bandaid" fix. The whole system needs to be analyzed to find an engineered solution.

Tom