theboondork's RV blog

I finished the Andersen ultimate hitch installation

7/26/2017

A Hibiscus in my daughter's flower garden

It was a hot humid day in Denver, it only got into the mid-80s but the humidity was high so that made it pretty miserable.

Since I'm headed up to Montana Sunday morning there's a lot of things I need to get done before I go so I've been pretty busy lately, And normally putting in a new hitch is not something I would tackle with all of the other things I need to do but in the case of the Andersen Ultimate hitch it really has been a piece of cake.

I put the female part of the hitch on the Arctic Fox and it was literally a five minute job. Two bolts, four Alan head screws, and it was pretty much finished. I still haven't figured out yet where I want to mount the push - pull handle that locks the hitch to the trailer, I may just leave it dangling until I've used it a few times so I can see where the most convenient location might be.

I backed the truck under the Arctic Fox and hooked it up to test it with the ball in its middle position. There are three positions for the ball, easily adjusted by pulling a pin and moving the ball up or down, and I thought the trailer looked pretty much in the same position fore and aft as it had been in with its old hitch.

The first thing that became apparent with the new hitch is the trailer has to be jacked up a few inches higher to clear the ball than it did to slide into the old hitch so it seemed like I spent more time Jacking the trailer up and down. It wasn't a big deal but the motors that raise and lower the trailers landing gear had to run for a longer period of time. So even though I was fairly satisfied with the trailer being level I decided to try the ball in the lowest position.

I jacked the trailer up off the ball reset it to its lowest notch and lowered the trailer back down again. And even though standing back and looking at the trailer it didn't look much different than it did with the ball in the middle position when I went inside and put a level in the freezer, where I normally check for level, the level was absolutely perfect. And since there was still 6 or 7 inches of clearance between the trailer and the sides of the bed I'm going to leave it like that for now.

I did some rough measurements while it was hooked up and it looks like there's plenty of room between the sides of the bed and the back of the pin box so it shouldn't be hitting anything when I make a sharp turn, but I won't completely trust it until I've made a few sharp turns without crushing my bed walls. Which by the way was already crunched on the left side by my previous fifth wheel during a very sharp turn.

Because of a storage box that I built for the front of my truck bed it's always been hard for me to see the hitch and the pin when they get close together so hitching up in the past has always meant getting out of the truck two or three times to check how things are going during hitch up. Unfortunately the new hitch didn't solve that problem. Now if you don't have a box in the back of your truck you will be able see everything just fine but I've always had to put a piece of tape on the pin box and on my homemade storage box that I would line up when I was hitching up. The tape still works perfect to line up the new hitch ball side to side but I need to invent some ingenious way to line up the ball fore and aft which you don't have to do with a regular old-style hitch.

So far what I like most about it is when it's hitched, you know for certain that it's hitched, there's no guessing, there's no hoping, there's no fairly certain, all it takes is a quick glance from virtually anywhere around the truck and you can tell that ball is absolutely positively safely hitched, there is no ambiguity. With my old hitch to get that same kind of certainty I would have to get under the fifth wheel overhang let my tailgate down a little ways and look deep inside the back of the hitch, often with a flashlight, to make sure the jaws were closed and locked.

If you spend some time on the RV forums you will find people talking about accidentally dropping their trailer into the bed of their truck, and damaging the trailer and the bed side walls, and unfortunately its not as rare as you might think. In fact a lot of people recommend doing a "pull test" where you Jack up the landing gear so it's about an inch off the ground, hold the trailer brakes on, or chock the trailer wheels, and then pull a little bit with the truck just to make sure the hitch is really holding. I see no reason to ever have to do that with the Andersen ultimate hitch.

The more I deal with the hitch, the more I like it, and the better I feel about it. Most of the apprehension I felt about the hitch when I ordered it has gone away. I think the only thing I need now is to take a trip so I can see how it will handle on the road especially dirt roads. And only then will it become a trusted part of my boondocking life.

theboondork

This shows the lubricant that's molded into the female ball socket so you never have to lube the ball.

This is my old kingpin just before I put on the new ball hitch

The new ball socket

The Andersen ultimate hitch ball socket

The trailer and the hitch lined up together

Anderson ultimate hitch hooked up Denver Colorado

The ball fully seated, there's no mistaking that it's hitched up

7 Comments

Barney Ward

7/26/2017 09:36:54 pm

On the push pull handle. C clamps and vise grips can usually help hold it when trying different locations especially along the top bed rails. Have fun.

theboondork

7/27/2017 09:28:05 am

Yeah something like that is probably what I will do temporarily, one guy said he held it in place with magnets. There's a lot of different ways you can do it because it's so easy to move in and out. I'm used to having to pull and tug on my old hitch as hard as I could sometimes to get it to unhitch but this push-pull handle moves in or out with one finger.

Getting toooo anxious to head to Montana. Tom

Vall & Mo link

7/27/2017 02:56:56 am

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the great report -- this is certainly the best, most detailed write-up on the Andersen hitch I've ever seen (and I did quite a bit of searching).

Specially interesting when you say it's easy to see the hitch is connected... Just one question: it's not as easy to see whether it's locked (ie that the lock handle is correctly actuated), right? I worry about that because I've heard some jokers like to pull the lock open on conventional fifth-wheel hitches when the owner leaves them unattended (gas station toilet stop, for example) and that some RV folks use padlocks to secure theirs against exactly that sort of thing. I wonder whether the Andersen would be vulnerable to the same sort of shenanigans and what could be done to prevent them...

Cheers,
---
Vall.

7/27/2017 09:33:33 am

Thank you for the comment Vall & Mo. I'm sure I will be writing a lot more when I start towing with it Sunday morning.

Because of my upbringing I am a locking fanatic, I lock up everything. On my old hitch I locked the hitch to the rails, I locked the handle that unlocked the hitch, and I locked the kingpin when the trailer was unhitched. Now I don't know if any of that was necessary but it made me feel better so I always did it. And I doubt if I will change now.

Since the Andersen hitch is so different you mostly can't use normal means of locking it up but I've already locked the hitch to the rails using the method I used with my old hitch, I'll put a picture of it in my next blog post.

As for the push-pull locking handle, that does look like a tricky thing to be able to lock up and as yet I haven't found anything on the Internet that would help me with that problem, so here's the way I'm lowering my stress levels about it.

The handle will normally be screwed into a position on the trailer where it's easy to see, which means that you should be able to glance at it and see that its locked or unlocked. The difference in this new locking mechanism and the old-fashioned hitches is that if someone pulled the handle on the old-style hitch you had to look very carefully to notice that it had been done. The position of the locking handle or the jaws would tell you that something was amiss but those are things you would have to be looking for and were easy to overlook. If you did notice it then you were going to have to basically re-hitch the trailer to the truck all over again. And if you happen to not notice what had gone on, as soon as you moved the the truck the trailer is going to land in the bed of your truck.

The push-pull handle doesn't work that way. It's easy to tell when it's locked or not and if it is in the wrong position all you have to do is push it in and you're locked up again and another thing that made me less worried about it, is a guy on the Internet wrote that he had forgotten to push the push-pull handle in to lock it and drove all the way to the campground with the hitch unlocked, and nothing happened. The ball goes into the socket a long way and it would take one heckuva bounce to pull that ball all the way out of the socket.

I'll probably still work on a way to put a lock on the handle, not that I think it needs it, I just don't want the Vandals to take my handle. [Thank you Bob Dylan].

Tom

7/28/2017 12:08:17 am

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the clarification regarding the locking handle, I understand it a lot more now.

Re: security and locks, I feel basically the same way: after a few decades working with computer security, I've seen so much "stuff" that I feel a lot better when things are locked down.

And you touch in an interesting aspect which I haven't thought of so far: standard locking hardware won't fit the Andersen. For example, you could perhaps fit a ball lock into the hitch adapter's hole, but if someone was interested in towing away the trailer while you were away, it would be much simpler to just remove the hitch adapter, ball lock and all (after all, it's just a couple of Allen bolts, right?) and pull it with a standard 5thWheel hitch.

An Andersen lock would need to have a way to cover these bolt heads, for example, while it was in place.

Food for thought...

Cheers,
--
Vall.

Theboondork

7/28/2017 08:14:07 am

There actually is a locking mechanism made for the Andersen hitch, at least the part that hangs from the trailer, it's called the Fort Knox and Amazon sells it, surprise surprise. Unfortunately It sells for $190 and that doesn't even include the lock.

You're right about removing the hitch mechanism and until I can come up with something better that's what I will be doing. You will have to loosen four Alan head set screws, remove two 5/8 bolts, and detach the locking handle. Then I will be able to put my regular kingpin lock on it.

my Andersen safety chains were delivered yesterday, and I'll put a picture of them in the blog today. They use eyebolts to replace the 5/8 bolts that are in the mechanism, and the chains hang from the eyebolts. Maybe there's an opportunity there for an ingenious individual to use the safety chains to lock up the whole Andersen ultimate hitch system....hmmmm, where can we find an ingenious individual?

Tom

7/30/2017 04:54:09 pm

Thanks for the heads-up regarding the Fort Knox. And I agree with you, $190 is really too much for something like that.

Your solution of removing the coupler and then attaching a conventional kingpin lock gave me an idea for a possibly efficient and cheap way of locking the coupler in place, see my last post (in your next blog post, as I'm reading your blog in reverse order).

Cheers,
--
Vall.

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I finished the Andersen ultimate hitch installation

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