Trailer Weight

John Smith wrote:
Bob Kuykendall wrote:

160-180 lbs nose weight sounds a lot. About 100 would be my preference
for stability, 50 or less to make it easier to manhandle but with some
sacrifice of stability...

Just as a reference point, while using glider trailers to haul molds
and tooling around I've occasionally had to drive long distance with
zero tongue weight. Stability didn't seem to be a problem at all,
though I was pretty constantly worried about having the tongue lift
off the tow ball. We checked it often.

My Anschau trailer (for a single seater) is placarded: "Tongue weight
4%, more than 25kg not nessecairy."

Another data point.

I have an old, probably home built, ladder frame, ply floor alloy-skin
Libelle trailer with around 20 lbs (10 kg) nose weight that tows stably
at up to 70 mph on the back of a 2 litre Focus estate. The trailer is
very low narrow with a semi-circular top. The fuselage dolly barely
clears the wing roots on either side when its rolled out and there's a
foot high fin-box thats only 4 inches higher than the Libelle's fin.
Practicality is borderline but the cross section is nice and small.

I'm guessing the nose weight: its an easy single hand lift to put it on
or off the car's ball. It's much lighter than lifting the Libelle's
tow-out tow hitch to put that on the car to go and fly.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |