When we purchased this trailer in early 2013 we also purchased an Equal-i-zer hitch to go with it. During the course of 3 different tow vehicles, the hitch has been reconfigured and a couple of different shanks have been used. It is current iteration (2.5″ shank) the entire combination is very heavy:
I can manhandle it with my favorite hitch tool, the Hitchgrip. I talked about it in another blog post. Here it is in action:
But this post is about storage. That is where to store the hitch and equalizer bars. I normally just store them like I see others. Balancing them on the ‘L’ brackets:
As you can see above there is no security for the bars and they do tend to fall off when the trailer moves (normally this is about 2 am and it makes a very loud noise). I am looking for a better solution.
I normally will store the hitch in the trailer’s ball receptacle. I put a padlock on the latch and a receiver lock on the shank to make things a bit more difficult:
The huge problem with this is it requires two people. I lift up the hitch with two hands and Roxie slams down the latch. Also, I am not sure of the security of this setup (it can also be a real shin buster!), as I would much rather use this:
Here is my solution. It took me a bit to find a welder to do this for me. Essentially it is another hitch receiver with a location for the bars:
This is with the hitch slid into the receiver and secured:
Then the torsion bars slide into the top. They have holes in the so a deadbolt will fit right in to secure them:
Here is the final setup with all components:
This will make things so much easier as I can use my Hitchgrip to transfer easily between the two locations. The bars will not fall off or be stolen. Thanks to Gary’s Welding in Visalia and Amazon for getting the receiver to me overnight! I hope this helps others with their ideas.
