Preparing Your Vehicle To Tow
Part Four: Safety Equipment
In part four of our series of educational articles we will help you understand and prepare yourself and your tow vehicle for your first trip with your new trailer, and provide you with the necessary information to arrive on pickup day with confidence that everything will be a smooth and stress-free experience. In this article we will go over the additional safety components that you will need to come to pickup day with and what is included with the trailer.
While we all want your towing experience to be stress-free and safe, it is nevertheless important to emphasize how critical safety is when towing. Redundancy is the name of the game for towing safety, from the cotter pin on the hitch pins that secure the trailer and tow vehicle together, to safety chains, no part of the equation is unnecessary.
Proper towing safety is meant to keep you and those around you on the road safe, and the biggest danger to a safe towing experience is complacency; you’ll hear us say that when we hitch up a trailer we use the exact same procedure every time, this mental checklist allows us to ensure that no step gets missed. For many of our customers, towing their teardrop is the first time towing, and we want to make sure you feel confident on day one as you set out on your first of many memorable road trips.
In the image above, you can see an outline of a trailer-to-vehicle connection, this is a great visual for the mechanical and electrical connections between trailer and vehicle.
What your trailer includes:
- Coupler, either 2-inch ball coupler for Standard suspension packages, or Max-Coupler for All-Road and Off-Road.
- 5/8-inch hitch pin, for securing the coupler into the trailer.
- Two safety chains w/ keeper.
- Tongue jack for raising and lowering the front of the trailer.
- Lynch pin for 2-inch ball couplers
- 5/8-inch handle pin for Max-Couplers
- 7-way electrical cable
What you will need to bring on pickup day:
- Ball mount, with or without tow ball
- 5/8-inch hitch pin & cotter pin, for securing the ball mount to your vehicle’s tow hitch
- Pre-installed tow hitch, preferably Class 3
- Pre-installed and tested 7-way plug