DIY Overland Articulating Hitch

i don't have all the parts i need to build the tacoma i don't have all the parts i need to build the gladiator and now i don't have all the parts i need to build the engine of my tj so what do we built i think we should build an off-road trailer i've been getting asked to build one of these since i started this channel and i want to start with a suite let's see if you can see it back there articulating hitch setup today's episode is brought to you by empire abrasives all the abrasive discs cutting wheels grinding wheels everything you see that isn't abrasive on my channel is from empire i found the empire has the best combination of good price and great quality and this is why i choose to work with empire if you're looking for high quality abrasive products make sure you check out empire abrasives and if you want to save a little extra money use coupon code dirt lifestyle check out [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] then i've got something welded together and letting it cool let's talk about our game plan so everything is modeled after just a normal this is like as generic a hitch set up as you're ever going to find this is rated at 5 000 pounds got a 2 inch ball actually oh this 2 and 5 16 ball but usually 2 inch ball goes in there 2x2 so this is this is pretty common and you'll even see people haul way more than 5 000 pounds on one of these but we know we have a benchmark if we size things close to this we should be good for up to 5 000 and our trailer isn't going to be anything close to that i think if i over build the crap out of this trailer and we put a big tent on it and all of our gear and water and all that i don't see us getting any more than 1500 so if we use the sizing as people who aren't engineers if we mimic what engineers have done for 5000 i think that we're going to be in the clear let's start with our hardware size all of our hardware is going to be one inch hardware which is way overkill a one-inch grade eight bolt is extremely strong but let me get this nut off of here if you look at what the hardware size for this ball is it is one inch so i decided that all of our joints are going to be bolted together with one inch hardware because we've already seen that demonstrated and dot approved on something that you get it again we're not engineers we're trying to mimic what real engineers have done um now this what i want to do is i want to bolt this to a this this hitch and the reason why is because i want to be able to make it to where whenever we bolt this through we can basically change the height based on a normal hitch just like you would if we were hooking to a ball so if we needed this to be you know upside down we can mount it that way if we needed one that just goes straight through we can get a hitch that's just straight through if we need one with a four inch drop we can get it for the four-inch drop you see where i'm going to this so we're gonna start with this uh man that's still so hot i can feel it with these two pieces here i did a root pass and then i did a really hot cover pass we're going to add some gusseting and stuff but at least we're going to get some points on the board here what i want to do is i want to fit this over this inch and a half tube so this is 2 inch dom quarter wall super heavy duty stuff this is inch and a half dom quarter wall and so we're going to slide that over this we're going to be able to measure and then cut what we need and then we're going to use this is basically a spacer spindle that we're going to bolt down on top of here it's going to make more sense as i do it i just wanted to stop and give you guys a brief explanation as to how we're going to do this [Music] so [Music] uh [Music] step one is mocked up simple right so we have a one inch bolt going down through where that stud would have went on the uh on the hitch ball um and then we basically are using a smaller piece of tube on the inside of this to act as a bearing so we shaved that down because the outer diameter of this is an inch and a half the inner diameter of that is also an inch and a half so it made it extremely tight we would have been able to press it in with a press but then we wouldn't be able to get it to spin around but because we were able to smooth out the outside and take a foul or two off we're able to actually fit these in there and it's still snug fit but it spins no problem so the key to this is that i made this little spacer or bearing i guess a little bit taller than the outer sleeve material and the reason i did that is because whenever we tighten this all the way down i want to make sure that this is spinning against the sleeve and it's not the whole thing spinning against the bolt i prefer to have the bolt just be there for strength and not to be there as part of anything that rotates because if the bolt has stuff that's rotating on it it's much more likely that we're gonna be able to loosen it up so because the bolt stays stationary and the only things that spin are the contact between the this sleeve or this bearing i don't know what you'd call it this is i guess it's a bearing usually a bearing goes in between two things but either way it's some sort of a spindle i guess but because it spins between these two it makes it to where we can use the bolt just for strength and we don't have to worry about um it slowly loosening up over time because there's something spinning on the bolt hope that makes sense so we made it greasable because this is something i'm going to grease every time i go out to make sure that we have a very slow wear between all these parts and you know there should be only very slow wear this isn't something that just spins around super fast like a trailer axle bearing or anything like that this is just gonna be doing this nothing crazy it should never get hot it should never like this should not wear out very quickly because of how heavy duty and thick everything is and because of the fact that it's just not a whole lot of movement on these parts so anyway the next part because we have two axis knocked out right away we need to make a yoke to go over this and i want to make it a yolk that goes over this that connects into something that can spin 360 degrees this way and then that'll be our third access i have some ideas but to be honest with you what i need to do is i just need to start cutting and seeing what parts fit together and then we're going to go from there one of the funnest things about a project like this is that there's so many different ways you could do it you can really let your creative juices flow as long as you have a really good mechanical knowledge and understanding of how all these parts need to work together when designing things like this i really keep in mind leverage leverage is everything and something can be really strong if it doesn't have a whole lot of leverage on it and then whenever you oversize your components could be even stronger and these are the kinds of ideas that i keep in mind whenever i'm designing something like this [Music] material thickness is also a very important consideration whenever you're designing something from scratch like this and this has an extremely important job this trailer coming off of the back of this vehicle is not going to be an option and because we're not engineers we can't really build it to the bare minimum because we don't have the means to calculate what the bare minimum is so i suggest over building things a bit this is not the place to skimp this has such an important job and literally could be a life or death decision when you decide to save a couple bucks and go a little bit thinner [Music] so [Music] there it is believe it or not this is actually super simple so i'll show you why i did this the way that i did it but first i'll show you that it moves in every direction this thing does exactly what it's supposed to do it articulates in three different axis and this is gonna give us a lot of flexibility off-road so let's uh let's start by saying this part goes to the truck or tow vehicle and then this part is going to be the first part of our trailer so you're looking at the very first piece that is going to we're going to build the trailer off of now this doesn't rotate on the bolt i want to be super clear about that i've seen a whole bunch of setups on youtube that i think are extremely unsafe and it's because they make it to where their whole system just pivots on one bolt and the reason you don't want to do that is because when this has a whole bunch of weight on it you've got tongue weight and everything else and it starts spinning it'd be real easy for over time it loosen that bolt up and if that bolt is all that holds your truck and trailer together that's a huge problem so this bolt just helps to encapsulate this collar whereas the yoke that we built here just rides only on the spindle so if you look those two collars are not spinning at all because these collars are connected to the spindle they're not connected to the yoke so the reason we have a bolt at all is because once i press fit this collar on and then i tightened it down i wanted to make sure that we had a bolt that was going to give it extra reinforcement because who knows one day i mean i i could see a situation where i have someone behind me who's stuck and i need to pull them out with the trailer i want to make sure this has a ton of clamping force and that one-inch grade eight bolt is a ton of clamping force so that bolt actually runs through and uh there's a nut on the back side here the reason it's so long is because there's i couldn't fit a nut inside so we have a one foot long bolt with a nut back here and that just kind of it it pulls the whole thing together just by helping to encapsulate this collar i hope all that makes sense this yolk is way overkill but that's what i wanted i wanted something super overkill so if we have a situation where this gets stuck on a rock and we have like a whole trailer hanging off behind it i can just throw a winch line and i can drag this whole thing through a bunch of rocks and i'm not worried and i'm telling you right now as someone who's built a lot of stuff having a double shear three-quarter inch three-quarter inch yoke is super strong this is going to be stronger than like anything on the truck anything on the trailer this is ultra strong so this is pretty much done you can see how my design is here i wouldn't exactly call it budget i will i'll put together how much this cost and i'll put it in the description of the video the only thing i have left to do and i'm going to do this at a later date so i'm going to add a couple gussets in here just to make sure that that's not just weld that's connecting these two so i'm going to add a couple of really heavy duty gussets probably three of them to make sure that this is going to be a super strong component as well so anyway after that all we have left to paint it but before we get to any of that and before you get to see it actually being used in person we need to finish building our trailer and this is the first piece of the trailer so once i finish this video and i edit it i'm going to start building the trailer out here one final thought before we go and that is that i don't encourage you to build anything that i build ever in here especially something as important as a hitch so i hope that these videos inspire you to go and build things like bumpers and sliders and whatever but i would never recommend someone build one of these articulating hitches themselves um it's just it's honestly it's not smart i have a lot of experience building this stuff and what's amazing is you can look into the laws here in this country there's not a it's pretty gray there's not a lot of laws saying that i can't build this but that doesn't mean that i should it doesn't mean that you should so if you if you go look around what i can say what i highly recommend you do is just consider buying one of these articulating hitch setups that already exist it's like three four five hundred bucks there's a bunch of different options out there they're dot approved they've been engineered by people that actually know what they're doing and it'll get your trailer down the road and if if that trailer comes off and it was a dot-approved hitch that an engineer did it's not your fault as long as you hooked everything up correctly but if we build it here in the shop and that trailer comes off and it hurts somebody there's a lot of responsibility on our shoulders so i want you to consider all these things before you decide what projects to build i saw a lot of videos on youtube while i was researching doing this video that had hitches that were that had no business being on the road they were so poorly designed they're they're selling the video is like this is the way to do it cheap not this is the way to do it right and that already is a red flag so if it's like a 50 trailer articulating hitch setup it's for a reason and i guarantee if you talk to any articulating hitch manufacturer we're gonna tell you the same thing there is a lot of scary stuff that is going down the highway out here please please please consider the options before you decide to build something like this anyway i don't want to uh mother you anymore and i hope you enjoyed the video i just think that there's a lot of consequences to what we do here in our shop and i want you to consider that before you just copy what nate does don't ever copy with an does just decide for yourself what what level of responsibility you're willing to take and then go from there so if you want to help support the channel you go to the theatre lifestyle we have t-shirts hats netgators we've got a link to our patreon account on there as well i do an extra video a week for the patreon people the last video i did for patreon was our gladiator towing test i took my wife's gladiator we did a whole bunch of put a bunch of wood in a trailer and wood in the bed and we went and hauled it and i just kind of made a little video on my thoughts so if you're into that kind of thing make sure you join that community we have a link on our website if you don't follow me on social media i'm at dirt lifestyle nate we'll see you next time [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Dirt Lifestyle

Views: 158,359

Keywords: trailer hitch, offroad hitch, off road, overland trailer, trailer hitch installation, offroad hitch cargo carrier, off road hitch, offroad hitchgate, off road camper, off road trailer, off road camper trailer, trailer hitch lock, trailer hitch cargo carrier, trailer hitch extension, off road extreme 4x4, overland trailer camping, overland trailer diy, overland trailer setup, overland trailer build diy, overland trailers 2021, overland trailer build

Id: uweotzg0-FM

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021