Towing Your Own Vehicle

Towing is generally related to an emergency situation that arises when your vehicle ditches you in the middle of nowhere.

This is a misconception. This is a process which can also be implemented when you want to go out on a vacation or on a long road trip which requires carrying a lot of stuff in the form of say a caravan. This makes it important to understand the mechanisms involved in the entire procedure of towing.

The components required to tow your vehicle, called a dinghy in such a situation, with any other vehicle are basically a tow bar, a base plate kit, a safety cable set, the tow bar wiring and the supplemental braking system.

Tow Bar:

This part is designed accurately in order to link your vehicle to the tow vehicle such as a caravan for its safe flat towing. It is generally the same for all models varying only in the type of mount, towing capacity and the basic designs. These can either be RV mounted, which are sturdy, safe, easy to adjust, hassle free, involving a stable no-coupler required connection and secure storage capability or Car-mounted tow bars, which act similar to the A-frame trailers that can be attached to the trailer hitch ball on your RV with an integrated coupler, being economical for occasional RVers.

Base Plate Kit:

This is vehicle specific and the plates are installed on the dinghy’s frame using maximum number of existing attachment points in order to take complete care of safety and strength. The base plates include the frame bracket/s mounting directly into the dinghy’s frame and the draw bar arms that provide attachment points to the tow bar and these can either be fixed or removable.

Safety Cables:

These are required to link the different components involved in the setup ensuring the attachment of the dinghy and the RV at all times even in a situation where the tow bar somehow uncouples from the dinghy or the RV. The cable system includes a long cable that connects the RV hitch to the base plate arms on the dinghy and a small cable that connects the base plate arms to the frame-mounted brackets on the dinghy.

Tow Bar Wiring:

This is basically a lighting system that is meant to function in sync with the tow vehicle’s tail lights. It compromises of three parts.

• The removable exterior light kits including the magnetic towing lights and the hitch-mounted light bar.
• The separate tail light bulb kits that mounts inside the vehicle’s tail light housing and bypasses the dinghy lighting system.
• The diode light system which has wires in-line with the dinghy’s existing tail light bulbs and hardly requires any maintenance after its initial installation.

Supplemental Braking System:

These are required to decrease the braking distance up to 30 percent on some towing setups in addition to its function of minimizing the wear on both the vehicles and smoothing the braking.

The proper understanding and setup of the above components is a must for a safe and hassle-free towing.