Thread: Bolt to stop hitch rattling in the receiver

Originally Posted by BradC

Correct me if I'm wrong please but when you tighten that up, it looks like it'd lift the bar against the top of the socket. It'd stop the rattle, but when you load the bar it'd be placing load on your anti-rattle bit rather than the bottom of the socket.

Your correct, but I think these U bolts are normally used on trailer axles, and often in tension. I suspect that it's over engineered.
In the case of failure, the setup should just revert to the original configuration.
I don’t think this configuration is a potential problem, but I’m certainly open to comments.

Isn't that a anti rattle bolt I can see in the bottom of your receiver. ?

Geezuz! All this faffing around! Just fit the bolt & welded nut at a 45* top corner on a tube type.

Job done.

Just sayin'

Originally Posted by theelms66

Isn't that a anti rattle bolt I can see in the bottom of your receiver. ?

Yes, but it doesn't work very well. I've tightened it several times.
My present design is much more positive.

The first time I towed my Caravan I had the same issues with looseness and surging even though the tongue was a pretty tight fit.
I also had problems with my brakes on the van through the Redarc Elute V3 Tow Pro taking 2 seconds to come on and 2 seconds to come off which was pretty disconcerting to say the least.

However, I fitted the M10 bolt to the underneath of the hitch and it was now rock solid. The van never made a murmur after this and what's more my van brakes worked immediately after this bolt fit. So I had a bad earth even though I didn't know it at the time. I know I wired it properly with great heavy duty connections the body presents a much better path for the return -ve through the proper bonding of the tongue to the car. So now I will check the plugs and earth points for a poor connection, but al least I found the problem. The aluminium body of the D5 is a fantastic conductor the tiny plugs on the 12 pin connector not so much especially on the van side with very small capacity wiring as standard.

You should not be depending on an earth through the towbar. It should only be through a dedicated wire in the electrical loom.

I would be checking that there is in fact one in yours. Otherwise, you will have problems with lights as well as your brakes. Incandescent lights can find earth through other lights, particularly through dual filament lights like stop/tail lights.

The new Disco - I picked it up today - came with a tow hitch which has shims to try to stop the rattle. Unfortunately, it is too low for my off road camper so I am going to have to find one with less offset - all of mine have way too much.

Cheers
Numb Thumbs

Even with two shims mine rattled, so I added some cable tie ends on the top and one side. Problem gone. Have yet to tow, so I will see how it goes with some load on the tow hitch once I have a few kms on the car.

Cheers
Numb Thumbs