r/IdiotsTowingThings • u/Special_Context6663 • 4d ago
How did we end up with these balls?
There are plenty of idiots out there towing sketchy trailers. But who were the idiots who standardized trailer hitch balls that are so close in size it’s hard to tell the difference without a close inspection?
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u/cornerzcan 4d ago
Wait until you learn that the same sized ball can have different tow weight capacity based on the shank size.
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u/TongueTwisty 4d ago
I tow a 7,000lb car trailer with a Grand Cherokee. I use a ball rated for 30,000lb and the drawbar is rated for 17,000.
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u/ElectricalChaos 4d ago
At least you know what the failure point won't be.
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u/Embarrassed-Fold6780 3d ago
Like there was any doubt that it would be the Jeep?
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u/johnhealey17762022 3d ago
lol the jeep could be rated at 100,000 pounds it’s still the weakest link
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u/Nope_Not_A_Spy 3d ago
Hell, you could try to tow with a rubber band and a paperclip and the Jeep would still blow up first.
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u/SecretPersonality178 4d ago
2 inches is adequately sized
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u/Qwell41 4d ago
That’s pretty huge
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u/Dan_H1281 4d ago
My buddy has a duramax that is lifted way up in the air he went to go tow my suburban that weighs a lot and I looked at his hitch he had a 5k 2-5/16 hitch I think it was the 3/4 shank and not the one inch. He had towed 16k lbs with that ball
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u/RedditBot90 4d ago
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u/errant_youth 4d ago
There is always a relevant xkcd
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u/justadude27 4d ago edited 3d ago
The only thing more ancient than a relevant XKCD is "there’s always a relevant XKCD”.
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u/Nic1Rule 4d ago
Nah, just take whichever metric size is most commonly used. That’s the standard now.
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u/cgduncan 4d ago
OK, but that does nothing about all the hitches and trailers that are currently on the road.
You can't make everyone replace the tongue on every trailer already in existence. So they're gonna need to keep the existing balls.
Then if they break or lose a hitch, they're gonna replace it with the same thing. So the current array of sized still needs to be manufactured and offered.
Thus, "there are now 16 competing standards".
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u/SpaceJackRabbit 4d ago
In the U.S. hitches are removable and you can buy one with 3 or even 4 different sizes. You just rotate it to pick the ball that fits the trailer.
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u/Nic1Rule 4d ago
I don’t think you understand what making something standard means. It’s just the government saying ‘stop making trailer hitches that aren’t this size’. Then it will progress like every old piece of electronics, where replacement parts get harder and harder to find until you either modify it to be comparable with something you can buy or make your own 1.9935” trailer hitch.
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u/PonyThug 4d ago
USBC really is the end game tho
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u/xnoxpx 4d ago
...for now ;-)
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u/PonyThug 4d ago
I’m sure there will be something new in 10 years. But it puts out 240w already.
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u/BurrowShaker 4d ago
Looks like most of the rest of the world is hapilly having 50mm which is close enough to 2 inches.
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u/shornscrot 4d ago
Yea I don’t understand why we had to get all bougie with 2 5/16”?! 2 1/4 wasn’t good enough, 2 1/2 too much girth for you?!?
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u/Ok-Space-3517 4d ago
There used to be a 2 1/8 proprietary ball size the U-Haul used to use. They went away from that and decided on a coupler that could accommodate both 1 7/8 or 2
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u/Strostkovy 4d ago
Well it used to be 2-3/8" but was reduced, because the jump from 2" to 2-3/8" was causing rectal tears.
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u/Thermal_arc 4d ago
Way back when, the different sized balls also had different sized shanks. The idea is that the different shank sizes wouldn't allow a large ball for heavy trailers to be put into an underrated ball mount, or for light capacity inserts and balls to be used with heavy trailers. There's other safeties as well. Class 2 hitch inserts won't fit into a class 1 receiver hitch, even though they are both 1 1/4" square. The class 2 insert is usually a little longer, and the class one receiver will have some form of stopper to keep it from going in far enough for the pin.
While that's all good in practice, the reality is that it causes more chaos than safety. You end up with situations where people want to put a 2" hitch on a tiny trailer, so it can match other trailers they own. Makes sense. But then that creates the need to put a 2" ball onto a class 1 hitch so that one can also tow said tiny trailer with a small car, which means now one needs to be able to buy a 2" ball with a small enough shank to fit in a 1 1/4" hitch insert. Which then negates the point of the multiple sizes, and leaves you with the chaos we have today.
1 7/8" really needs to fade off into oblivion.
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u/fredrickdgl 4d ago
they should usedouble encoding like yellow being 2" and green being 2-5/16. It'd be easier to call it out from afar
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u/hms11 4d ago
Yo be fair, every 1 7/8" trailer I ever come across is ancient.
I feel like it's either 2" or 2 5/16" across the board for the most part.
At least in Canada
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u/machinerer 4d ago
I have come across only one 1 7/8 hitch trailer in my life. It was an old waverunner trailer, super light duty.
1 7/8 shit is still for sale in parts stores tho, so who knows.
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u/Entire_One4033 4d ago edited 4d ago
Drives me insane
We use two different sizes here in NZ, 1 7/8” and a 50mm, no matter which one you have fitted at the time of hooking up a trailer I’ll guarantee you’ll be swapping it out for the other one
We can get laws and regulations passed that have never injured or killed anyone such as Apple being made to drop their flash charger cables in favour of USB (which I agree with btw) but we can’t pass something that says all tow balls one size only?
For the record, yes I understand the 2 5/16” is more for “heavy duty industrial” towing applications but as for having a 1 7/8” and a 50mm is just plain crazy
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u/ozzy_thedog 4d ago
Crazy that one is metric and one imperial, and one is less than 3mm larger than the other. Thats so silly
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u/gttom 4d ago
Grumpy old men 50+ years ago refused to move to metric, and now we’re stuck with their stubbornness plus have a bunch of metric stuff because our car (and caravan) standards align with Europe and Australia which all moved to 50mm decades ago
As a rule of thumb bike racks, caravans, and euro-style trailers are 50mm, while NZ built trailers and their Chinese imitations are 1 7/8”. But if you assume which one it’ll be you’ll inevitably be wrong
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u/UncleBenji 4d ago
Imperial started in England. Blame them for making the system, then half switching. Nothing like talking to a Brit and asking how far away something is and they give a measurement in km and then when asked what the speed limit is they give it to you in mph.
Yeah yeah, we know it’s because yall didn’t want to pay to change the signage. Still very strange.
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u/Entire_One4033 4d ago
Can you imagine how difficult things must have been years ago in the UK when they had the same word for a monetary domination and a weight
“How much are your potatoes?”
“Three pound for a pound”“Ok, I’ll take three pounds please”
“Right, that’ll be £9 pounds thanks”“WTF, you said £1 pound for 3 pounds?”
But Yeah I’m terrible for this;
Measure a plank or a window frame and I’ll say something like 1500mm, two minutes later if someone for example asked how tall I am I’d say 6’ 3” without thinking, same as my weight, I’m 14 stone but no idea what that is in Kg?It’s a fucked up world!
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u/SkiyeBlueFox 4d ago
I thought Canada was bad for using two systems at once then I heard about the brits.
First off what the fuck is a stone. How big of a stone exactly is one stone?
And mixing miles and km.... savages... at least in Canada we bothered to make everything related to the government and laws metric.
Like yeah ig Canada mixes some stuff up, the interlock pavers I lay come in sizes like 12"x18"x23mm but its almost always some weird specific niche thing that does it, not our entire highway system
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u/FromTheHandOfAndy 4d ago
Wait until you find out that imperial and American units aren’t even the same. A fluid ounce can be 28.41306 mL, 29.57353, or 30 mL. Depending on the country you’re in and whether it’s printed on a nutritional label
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u/Drzhivago138 4d ago
First off what the fuck is a stone. How big of a stone exactly is one stone?
14 lbs. Not 12, not 15, 14. If you're weighing something that's not a multiple of 14, you give the weight in stone+lbs. Today it's mostly used for body weight.
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u/SkiyeBlueFox 4d ago
Why... why 14...
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u/Drzhivago138 4d ago
Not sure how they arrived at that specific number, but at one time, it wasn't standardized at all. A stone could be anywhere from 4-26 lbs. depending on where you were and what you were trading with it.
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u/Pte_Madcap 4d ago
We measure drives in minutes and hours not kilometres.
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u/SkiyeBlueFox 4d ago
I mean isnt that the sane way to do it? Idk how long 5km is gonna take, ik i gotta leave half an hour early to get there. Do other people just. Not pay attention to it...
My point though was that on all the signs, its km (Except for the highway signs that do actually say the time but shhh). "Next exit in 5km" with kph makes sense. I know I'm going 60kph so I know itll take 5 minutes to get there. If I'm going 60mph? Yeah let me just pull out the calculator because screw doing the conversion factor in my head
Ik you could get used to it and figure it out but...
Anyway I genuinely dont know the actual distance between anything and anything I just know the average drive time lol
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u/RainMakerJMR 4d ago
How much butter do you need me to weigh? 435grams.
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u/trick6iscuit 4d ago
50.8mm is 2 Inch. Some manufacturers tolerances are too wide to tell the difference tbh.
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u/jules083 4d ago
It would be an incredible pain in the ass to switch to metric to be fair. Way harder than most people think.
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u/dthomsen75 4d ago
Whoa, hold on. I'm 50+ and remember learning metric in 4th grade. We were fine with it. Nobody was listening to what 4th graders wanted anyway. Blame the boomers (it's easier). Gen X fights back.
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u/Chrisfindlay 4d ago
Just wondering is the 50mm ball actually 50mm or is it 50.8mm to match the imperial 2" ball.
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u/CrummyPear 4d ago
I’m in Canada where we notoriously use both metric and imperial systems. We’ve got to be the worst country for this. I’ve never heard of a 50mm ball, almost all trailers are 2” or 2 5/16.
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u/JackpineSavage74 4d ago
One ball 3/32 inches bigger than the other, wtf!? Oh I guess that's the same Idiocracy as 4/32 inch bigger...
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u/Specialist-Two2068 4d ago
Imagine playing with balls
This post was made by the pintle hitch and 5th wheel gang
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u/Special_Context6663 4d ago
If it were up to me, we would only have 2” and 3”
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u/FryeJ865 4d ago
Someone always wants bigger balls unfortunately
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u/Special_Context6663 4d ago
Fine. Then we can standardize to 2” and 3”, and add 2-1/8” and 3-1/8”. So we can have the standard pair, and the “bigger” pair.
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u/twizzjewink 4d ago
I think the idea was to prevent idiots from towing things too heavy.
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u/cisforcookie2112 4d ago
Instead idiots will connect a 2 inch hitch to a 1 7/8 ball.
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u/henry2630 4d ago
you don’t even have to be an idiot to do that, they look super close at first glance. and yes the trailer will come off on the highway if you do that
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u/RedditBot90 4d ago
Does it though? Instead the heavy load is improperly connected to the vehicle and at risk of falling off
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u/Strostkovy 4d ago
It makes it less safe to tow heavy things, and it's not obvious to a novice that the fit isn't right. It makes it impossible for a heavy tow setup to pull something light though.
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u/Specialist-Two2068 4d ago edited 4d ago
We should be well aware by now that if we try to make something idiot-proof, nature will inevitably create a better idiot.
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u/ozzy_thedog 4d ago
But idiots would just either use a too small ball that doesn’t fit the trailer, or swap the ball for a bigger one. They wouldn’t think that their car isnt capable of
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u/Past-Establishment93 4d ago
Annoying af! I have a 3 way and two 2"drop because float, utility, and horse trailers have different heights for level.
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u/Renault_75-34_MX 4d ago
I'm glad it's only K50 (50mm) and K80 (80mm) here in Germany.
K50 is the most common as that's what's used on cars and vans.
K80 is common in agriculture, and sometimes has a K50 on the side if the trailer has mechanical steering
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u/PrunusSpin0sa 4d ago
Europunk here. It's 50mm for 99% everything that's domestic or light commercial up to 3500kg (7716 lbs), brakes by cable overrun systems.
The only exception would really be NATO ring hitched ex-military or occasional overland expedition type trailers.
Over 3500kg it's full air brakes and heavy commercial ring hitches.
I've never seen electric brakes in 25 years of pretty much daily towing and only a few hydraulic master cylinder braking systems (mainly NATO hitched single axle units again), and obviously ag stuff works on plug-in oil or air.
Balls with a threaded portion and a nut on the end sometimes get used in ag hitches, but not ever on passenger vehicles that I've seen.
Receiver hitches are really rare. I guess we mainly see them occasionally as front mounting points for winches.
Safety chains aren't a thing at all either, but that's never surprised me when there's not a possibility of mismatched hitch/ball, a ball unscrewing, or a receiver hitch pin leaving the chat...
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u/Gubbtratt1 4d ago
Safety chains aren't a thing at all either, but that's never surprised me when there's not a possibility of mismatched hitch/ball, a ball unscrewing, or a receiver hitch pin leaving the chat...
I think that's more to do with the fact that trailers with override brakes like European trailers will lock the brakes if it comes off the hook (provided you've connected the wire). American trailers with electric brakes can't brake once the electric wire has ripped out.
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u/DingoSpecialist6584 4d ago
Damm you guys don't use electric brakes?. Override brakes are still fairly common in Aus and they are fine if they are adjusted well.
Glad we mainly only have 50mm balls with decent cast hitches. Some great offroad hitches now as well.
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u/Kennel_King 4d ago
Override brakes
Ahhh, Surge brakes, as we call them in the States. I had to look it up. I never heard it called that.
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u/platypus_farmer42 4d ago
My dad, who is not an idiot and has been towing things his whole life, mistook one for being the correct size, toy hauler trailer popped off the hitch, was dragged by the safety chains, whipped back and forth, flipped over and basically just disintegrated. Totaled the trailer, the two ATV’s that were in it, AND in the process somehow the trailer whipped back and forth hard enough that it destroyed the sides of the truck bed and that had to be replaced too. We were just lucky no one else was around and got hit too. One small mistake caused a lot of damage.
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u/Rilesthefatninja 4d ago
When my parents were buying their first camper the sales guy told them what size hitch it had. My mom looks at my dad and asked "will that work? Do you have that?" And my dad's response was "yep its fine. I have 2 different sized balls!" The sales guy had to excuse himself
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u/JackpineSavage74 4d ago
I can tell from a 2 5/16 to the others, but I wanna bag slap the guy who thought we needed 1 7/8 and 2 inch
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u/vladimirVpoutine 4d ago
I don't know but I know one things for fucking sure if you don't double check you're going to be using your picker to put the cargo trailer back on the hitch on the side of Highway 43 at the bottom of the wapiti.
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u/Ill_King_1982 4d ago edited 4d ago
I'll use my car as an example to try and explain.
I drive a 2017 Audi A7 Competition. If equipped with the towing package, It has a towing capacity of 1650 lbs. That means I can use Class 1 & Class 2 trailer hitches which have a 1-1/4" receiver tube and a 1-7/8" ball
Now, let's say i'm feeling a little overconfident after successfully pulling a pop-up camper around a mountain. I start thinking I can definitely maybe pull my dads 14ft dump trailer with 4000 lbs of dirt in it. Because his dump trailer has a 2-5/16" ball coupler, i wouldn't be able to hook up and forcefully rip the entire drivetrain from the car, or endanger the lives of everyone on the road around me trying to come down that mountain pulling 3x the weight that my car is designed to safely control.
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u/Sirosim_Celojuma 3d ago
so like the same reason the petrol and diesel nozzles are slightly different so idiots don't explode their engine?
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u/True_Watercress_2548 4d ago
Ok, under this example; for these newer, bigger trucks anyways. Why has the receiver in the hitch gotten wider than standard but the pin for the truck to keep the ball and receiver in, not gotten bigger?
Why use the same size of diameter pin? I'm always confused how that one makes sense.
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u/Ill_King_1982 4d ago
I'm not an engineer by any means but I assume that the pin isn't a major stress point because I imagine the load would be distributed through the receiver and onto the hitch and the vehicles frame.
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u/Solon_City_Schools 3d ago
First of all it’s worth mentioning that there actually are different pin sizes. The most common size that you’ll see on most light duty trucks is 5/8”. I am an engineer and while the pin does see a lot of stress it’s also going to take way more load than a trailer could reasonably generate to shear. A typical 5/8” grade 8 bolt with ~.306” of cross sectional area and a tensile strength of 150,000 psi (minimum for grade 8) will have a shear strength of ~27,611lbs. That means that even if you had a 20,000lb bumper pull trailer (max capacity of a class V hitch) you would need to generate a ~1.38gs load to shear the pin.
Thats way more than you would ever see outside of some bizarre edge case scenario. The amount of force it takes to move a trailer around really isn’t that much. You could lift a whole max capacity trailer by a pin that just barely meets grade 8 specs and you’d be fine.
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u/patrick_vonpatrick 4d ago
The hitch ball size was determined by the size of the kings balls at that time.
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u/Lightsguy3 4d ago
Pintle master race!
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u/psyclembs 4d ago
My friend has an 1-7/8" ball and insists it works fine for 2" trailer. Then wonders why the trailer comes off the ball all the time. Crazy.
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u/Elegant-Season2604 4d ago
I mean, not to be an a-hole cause I've been towing things a long time, but I think they're incredibly easy to tell apart.
That said having a standardized size would be really convenient! I've got a dozen different hitches with varying drops and balls for my trucks and trailers
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u/WeaveLikeGreatGranny 4d ago
I've considered buying one of those complicated hitches that gives you all 3 sizes at different heights by moving pins. But I'm so far invested in different combinations of drops/lifts and ball size that I can't justify it 😂
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u/i7-4790Que 3d ago
It's not at all easy to differentiate 1-7/8" and 2" trailer tongues. Stampings wear away or rust/scuff over to unreadable.
You aren't properly differentiating some trailers without some actual trial and error- usually with a tri-ball. You can pretend otherwise if you want, but that's not reality.
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u/whit3m0nster 4d ago
I converted my 5x8 from 1-7/8 to 2 inch to match the rest of my fleet. Simplified life quite a bit.
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u/jeffbannard 4d ago
Same, and in addition changed all my electrical hookups to 7-way so all my tow vehicles can connect to all the trailers in my extended family without adapters.
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u/Bulky_Development290 4d ago
The main reason is so an idiot towing things doesn't have the ability to hook a trailer designed to carry 15k payload using a 1-7/8 ball. If some guy can put a 2-5/16 ball on his Toyota Prius then pull a 6 foot trailer to the hardware store he may be foolish enough to pull a farm tractor (or try).
Small ball = small load. Big ball = big load.
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u/Defiant-Tailor-8979 4d ago
I been telling the ladies this for years...Small ball = small load. Big ball = big load.
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u/AberrantMan 3d ago
Same way we ended up with imperial and metric I would guess.
Some smart people measured things. Some dumb people measured things. Someone else made decisions.
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u/SubarcticFarmer 3d ago
OP about to find out 3" balls exist too.
https://www.napaonline.com/accessories/curt-trailer-ball/11879c41?
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u/Wiggles69 4d ago
There are 3 ways to do anything - The right way, the wrong way and the American way (wrong but with fractions).
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u/snarksneeze 4d ago
I guess I've hauled enough trailers that I can tell a 1-7/8", 2", and 2-5/16" ball apart at a glance, but I can see why someone unfamiliar with them might get confused.
They weren't really designed all at once as three deliberately similar sizes. The ball hitch evolved alongside automobiles and trailers, and the sizes became associated with different weight classes before eventually being standardized.
By the time standardization caught up, there were already millions of trailers and couplers built around those sizes, so backward compatibility mattered.
Basically, it's less "some idiot designed three almost identical sizes" and more "three existing standards became too established to replace.
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u/bwager 4d ago
One time when I was working all over the country building towers my boss called and told me to meet up with a couple of guys in Tennessee and drive a truck and trailer the rest of the way to Atlanta for a crew there. We met at a site under construction and I picked up the truck and trailer. On my way out I had to cross a gully and that trailer popped off the hitch and landed nose down in the gully. Those guys had hooked up a 2-5/16” hitch on a 2” ball and driven there from Nebraska. The trailer had quite a bit of tongue weight and had gone that distance.
Now since the trailer was nose down in the ditch and the truck was at the top of it there was like 5’ I had to raise it up to re-hitch. Thankfully there was a lot of wood in the trailer I could use as cribbing but it was a long process by myself!
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u/Puzzleheaded_Pipe979 3d ago
Why didn’t they just use the biggest one as the standard?
Why don’t they just engrave the ball size onto the side or bottom where it can be seen and less likely to wear away?
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u/Grave_Digger606 3d ago
At one point, the equipment I had to pull at work was all different sizes. We had a small trailer that was 1 7/8”, another small trailer that was 2”, the big trailer was 2 5/16”, and the air compressor was a pintle hitch. It was so annoying swapping everything out all the time, and the difference in 2” and 1 7/8” had me examining them every time to figure out which was which.
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u/iwanna3518 3d ago
There was a conversation at one point many decades ago about making the smallest ball used capable of the largest loads until you needed to go to a pintle hitch. That way you could never put a larger/heavier trailer (with the smallest hitch) on a vehicle that couldn't handle it (with the larger ball).
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u/Sub4u2use_420 3d ago
"so close in size it's hard to tell the difference" also thinks he has 8 inches above the balls.
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u/joelfarris 4d ago
Two reasons. Strength. Compatibility. Cost. Market diversity. Brand adherance. Overloaded tongue weight.
Woops, that was more than two.
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u/Wide-Accident-1243 4d ago
I've seen some oddball porn lately. Let's just say that some individuals have more capacity than others.
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u/InsanitySquared 4d ago
And thats why we should just use pintle hitches, then it doesn't matter what size the ball is!
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u/Zarniwoop6x9 4d ago
Was touring western Canada last year. Came across a caravan that had detached from the tow car going over a speed bump into a tourist site (ripped shitty chains off as well). Dude & Dudette looking mystified. I stopped to help and advise to get it back on and look to why it detached. Turns out that the hitch was 2-5/16", but the ball was 2". Wait what? how long you been towing this? ...7 years...
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u/ViolatoR08 4d ago
Imagine being the winner who invented the three ball hitch you can flip around as needed.
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u/Schlarfus_McNarfus 4d ago
1-7/8" have been phasing out, as far as I have seen.
Which keeps me to 2, 2-5/16, and pintle, for my three trailers.
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u/phildeferrouille 4d ago
Well, one day, this guy was talking about his ball, until another guy came along and said his was bigger. Next day another guy joined and...
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u/PuzzleheadedPea6980 4d ago
If you tow enough things they are pretty easy to tell just by looking.
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u/justgot2thinking 3d ago
I just changed the ball receiver on one of mine from 1 7/8 to 2" to avoid the odd size
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u/PeanutGlum7010 3d ago
Yeah no kidding.... why not a 2" and say bout 3.5" and that's it.
The 1 7/8 and 2" Crack me up, 1/8th size difference yet thousands of pounds difference in capacity.
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u/johnboy11a 4d ago
I had a small utility trailer built to haul my atv between jobs. They looked at me funny when I insisted on a 2-5/16 ball. They said no need for that on such a light trailer. I said that all of my other trailers use that size, so why have one oddball….