f3user

I am looking around at WDH setups. It seems that you would certainly want sway control when pullling a big boxy travel trailer behind you that would really catch crosswinds, but I wasn't sure how necessary it would when pulling a car or tractor on an equipment trailer. Maybe in that case, WDH w/out dual sway control would be sufficient? Opinions?

xcntrk

This can be confusing when you're new to the towing and hitch market. You have to separate weight distribution from that of sway control. Many weight distribution hitches (only) hitches don't include sway control and in some cases you can add those features to the hitch. However all sway-control hitches includes weight distribution. You can read up on the differences on Etrailer:

http://www.etrailer.com/faq-weightdistribution.aspx

brulaz

Sway is also related to how much of the trailer weight is on the hitch. With only 10% and a big boxy trailer, you will NEED good sway control.

But with 15% of trailer weight on the hitch, I can get away without it. But it still helps.

With my older lighter trailer, I usually ran it without sway control when the TW was 15% or so. No problem. The trailer would occasionally bounce around behind me, but it never affected the truck.

Sway control can also be useful in emergency maneuvers to reduce jack-knifing when braking and swerve induced sway.

I recently had to swerve hard to the right when somebody cut in front of me. I had a single friction bar in place; the trailer swayed back and forth a couple of times and that was it. The truck's built in anti-sway never came on. A lower tongue weight trailer with no sway control could easily have gone into an uncontrolled oscillation. Not good.

smokeywren

If you have never experienced uncontrollable trailer sway, then you don't appreciate the need for an excellent sway control system. When towing a tag trailer, I want not only sway control, but excellent sway control any time my hitch weight is more than about 500 pounds or the gross trailer weight is more than about 4,000 pounds. My sway control system of choice in the "affordable" class is the Reese Strait-Line dual-cam that I use on my cargo trailer. For my TT, I have the much-more-expensive ProPride hitch that most folks would not include in the affordable class.

I don't normally use a sway control hitch on my utility trailers, but then I rarely gross more than 4,000 pounds with those trailers. If I need to haul more weight, then I would haul it in the cargo trailer that has the Strait-Line hitch. If I have to haul a heavier load on the flat-bed utility trailers, then I would move the Strait-Line hitch to the utility trailer. (Moving the ProPride hitch from one trailer to another is a major undertaking I don't want to do unless absolutely necessary.)