The Tow Hitch Near-Disaster I Didn’t Know About

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my annual battle with my ancient MTD snowblower. I threw $19 at it for another replacement carburetor, and it fired up immediately. I was resigned to soldier through the rest of the winter with it when something unexpected happened.

A dear friend called me up to bounce a question off me about buying a BMW unicorn E46 rear-wheel drive stick wagon. After we were done discussing it, he asked what was new, and I said “Oh, just the usual battle with the snowblower.” He said “I have a spare Ariens you can have if you need it.” Obviously, I was interested.

The story was that after his ex-wife had passed away last year, he helped their kids deal with liquidating the contents of her house. After the estate sale ended, there were items that hadn’t sold, including the snowblower. Neither of his kids wanted it, so rather than have it be liquidated by the real estate agent, he grabbed it. “It’s on the roof of my workshop,” he said (this isn’t as odd as it sounds; his property slopes downward so the roof is on street level), “but I don’t think it’s been fired up in a few years.”

My first thought was “Great. Another dead snowblower with old gas in it.”

Still, as with cars, you never know unless you look. So I drove the 15 minutes over to his house with a gas can, starting fluid, and my road toolbox, and was surprised to find a decent-looking Ariens AX369 Platinum SHO 24 with more chute controls than my decrepit MTD, and heated grips. There was some flaking paint and rust on the auger housing from sitting outside, but it still looked pretty nice.

I know the drill. Undo the shroud around the carburetor, spray some starting fluid into the throat, press the electric start, and see what happens. The red herring of a bad extension cord delayed the launch, but eventually I got the thing spinning. As I expected, it ran for a few seconds, then died. I drained the old gas out of the float bowl, dumped fresh gas into the tank, and it woke up as if nothing had happened. Cool.

However, when I squeezed the left lever, it didn’t budge. I soon realized that both of the wheels as well as the auger housing were literally frozen in place, though I was a little surprised that I didn’t hear the “ker-CHUNK” that my MTD makes when you put it in gear. Still, warm weather was forecast for the next few days, so the problem was going to resolve itself.

A few days later, I went back with my Armada and a crowbar just in case the ice needed some persuasion to release its grip on the Ariens. It did, but once free, the blower easily self-propelled itself onto the sidewalk. Right then. Let’s get this done. I’d already scoped out that the U-Haul dealer a few miles away had a motorcycle trailer I could rent to get the Ariens home, so I headed over there.

The U-Haul agent dragged the little motorcycle trailer to my trailer hitch and dropped it on. But when he tightened the knob on the top of the trailer tongue, the hitch ball wigged visibly. We both looked at it, surprised. When he undid the tongue and lifted it, the unthinkable happened:

The hitch ball came completely up and out of the hitch because the securing nut underneath it was completely missing.

My mind immediately raced. When was the last time I used the Armada and the hitch? In August I towed the BMW E30 (the FrankenThirty) home from Albany. I remember afterward whacking my shin on the hitch in my driveway, so I removed it and threw it in the back of the Armada. The next tow was the Lotus Elan +2 in November. The hitch had been on the back of the Armada ever since, but I hadn’t towed anything else.

So when did the nut fall off? Did I tow my precious little Elan +2 home from New Hampshire with an unsecured hitch ball?

Focus, Rob. You can do the post-mortem on this later. I told the U-Haul agent “I have another hitch at my house. I’ll be right back.” I did, I was, and I hauled home the Ariens home without incident.

But for the rest of the day, I thought about the likely mechanics of the missing nut. All medium-to-large trailers, including a U-Haul auto transporter, have enough unladen tongue weight that they have an integrated hand-cranked tongue jack to allow you to raise the tongue and then lower the tongue onto ball after you’ve backed up the vehicle so the hitch ball is under it. Only small things like motorcycle and garden trailers are light enough that they don’t have a tongue jack. So it’s quite possible that if the ball had come loose while towing the Lotus, neither I nor the previous U-Haul agent would’ve noticed when the auto transporter was unhooked because the gentle raising of the trailer with the tongue jack probably wouldn’t have disturbed the ball in the same way that manually lifting the motorcycle trailer did. I suppose it’s possible that the ball loosened up in the three months since I towed the Elan, but it’s far more likely that it happened during the jouncing and bouncing of the 70-mile vehicle tow. And while loaded auto transporters have a fair amount of tongue weight that would’ve kept the ball in place, the idea that a bounce could’ve lifted that ball out of its hole gave me shivers.

I’ve always been in the habit of, after I’ve passed papers on a car and loaded it onto the trailer, calling Hagerty to establish coverage before the tow home, but I never envisioned something like this. You can bet that from now on I am always going to double-check that the hitch ball is secure before I tow something. And leave a spare hitch in the back of the Armada.

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Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.