ball vs pintle

What's the deal with these?

I've always had pintle hitches on my bumper pull trailers. I haven't really noticed that much fore/aft play. And I've never had a trailer come unhitched. I guess it depends on what you get used to.

Dale

We used this Heavy Field Dynamometer for conducting drawbar and cooling tests on military vehicles. The 3 absorption trailers all had pintles and the dynamometer had one on the rear for coupling the trailers to it. We had drawbar pull of over 100000 pounds and never broke a pintle or a lunette. We did break one of the towbars on one of the trailers, but we think ice may have weaken it. When couldn't hold a vehicle
like the M1A1 tank and the German Leopard tank we used the M88 Recovery Vehicle behind the last trailer so we could hold them. We would run stalls just using the M88's brakes. Hal
PS: You had to cotter pin those pintles or they would come open.

The mitten/glove issue makes perfect sense, though.

Scott

Flt Line support compressors, generators, lite alls, A/C tow bars. Almost everything that is aircraft related uses pintles. Any size/weight rating can be hooked to almost any vehicle from bobtails to fork lifts to tow tugs, five ton GPs and tractors. We even had pintles on our gators and golf carts to tow test equipment and tool boxes.

I would say that interchange-ability (sp?) and versatility for the military are the main reasons. They are very quick to use, forgiving of alignment tolerances when hooking up and easy to see if they are properly secured and pinned.

As Joe M said, they can be worked in almost any conditions with any type of gloves from mittens to Chem Warfare gear. The troops only need to train on one system for everything.

About the only down side is the slop/movement on take off, slow down or stopping. Most pintle equipped AF equipment was restricted to 25mph and ten mph if loaded with munitions.

My seven civilain trailers have standard ball hitches. Even the ATV's garden trailer has a ball hitch.

Cheers Don

Aaron

"Without weapons the Air Force is just another unscheduled airline!" Or the one I never could get, I.Y.A.A.Y.A.S! (the more I thought about that one the more I decided that the two negatives did make a positive.) It"s all about hot steel on target.

Thank you for asking and thank you for your service. What color hat did you wear with what outfit? We could have brushed stripes and never even known it. Cheers Don

No size differences usually. I have seen too many clowns hook a 2 in hitch to a 1 7/8 ball and hit the road. Saw one come apart where a 2 5/16 hitch had been hooked to a 2 in ball. Not safe!

John T