Installing trailer hitch

[Mark]

I'm thinking of installing a trailer hitch to my wagon to tow a small utility/boat trailer for my 10' inflatable boat (so far I've been shoving it up on the roof rack and putting the motor in the back of the wagon, but this has been causing scratches on the hatch and other small damage/rust has been accumulating). The trailer+boat+anything else I'd put in it would probably weigh less than 500lbs (the boat only weighs 80lbs). My dumb question is how do you install a trailer hitch? Are there bolt holes already drilled in the bumper? Do you have to weld on a reinforcing bar with holes under there?

[jimcrazy]

i have a hitch on mine bolted to back side of bumper, took a load of garbage to the dump Saturday weight was about 650 pounds you knew you were hauling it. pulling the bumper of soon and changing it to the removeable receiver type tired of banging my shins on it

[jimcrazy]

back side bolt on

[Mark]

Did you bolt it into pre-existing holes or did you have to drill holes behind the bumper to match the holes in your hitch?

[jimcrazy]

the one that's on it came with the car, the holes for mounting should already be there in the bumper, the new one I got is for corolla wagon I may have to mod it match the holes

[Mark]

Thanks for the info and especially the pictures.

[Mark]

I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to find a frame-mounted type hitch for my wagon. I've tried fitting several for sale locally, but there's always interference with the gas tank on the one side. A strange thing I've found is that every hitch for every vehicle I've come across (trucks, minivans, SUV's, compact cars, new cars, old cars...) has a distance between frame rails of 41". It doesn't make sense to me that every vehicle from every manufacturer (that I've tried hitches from) has the same frame width. I'm pretty sure I've come across a vast conspiracy and if I've never heard from again it's because "They" found out.
Anyway, I gave up on frame-mounted hitches (which seem much more reliable to me) and looked for a bumper-mounted one. Here's a photo stolen from the internet showing the Tercel wagon one:

11649_a_trailer_hitch.jpg

I didn't want to spent a few hundred dollars for it (after the currency-conversion and shipping) so I found one locally for $20. It's from a 1960's Jeep, but it looks pretty much the same. I took off my bumper to mount it, but there were no holes to mount it to:

IMG_0252.JPG

I'm guessing I need to drill a hole here for the main mounting bolt?:

center mounting bolt.jpg

The center small hole in the bumper is drilled in a thin piece of metal that doesn't seem thick enough to hold a hitch.
And then I guess I have to drill 2 holes here for the cross piece?:

cross piece.jpg

The metal of the bumper doesn't seem strong enough (never mind the rust) to tow even a small trailer especially with the constant vibration from going over bumps while driving. I guess I'm just being paranoid, since this seems to be the standard way of doing it.

[ARCHINSTL]

Perhaps you could have an appropriately wide and perhaps 3-4' long piece of 1/4" (or thicker) metal welded to the bumper's bottom and then drill through that to mount your hitch (if it looks like the one in the first photo)?
This would be a sort of surrogate bumper or, if you will, a lower layer.
Do at own risk, naturally.
Tom M.

[irowiki]

One of my tercels has a hitch kinda like that, attached to the bumper, and it is welded on.

[Mark]

I did a quick wire brush of the bumper, painted it with rust converter and then gave it a couple of coats of rust paint. It's not meant to be pretty, but I'm hoping it will make it last longer:

IMG_0254.JPG

Here's the hitch before installation. I'm using the smaller, flat steel strips as backing pieces (almost like large washers) inside the bumper to distribute the load over a larger area:

IMG_0255.JPG

I drilled 3 mounting holes and here's the hitch installed:

IMG_0258.JPG

IMG_0259.JPG

I'll install the bumper tomorrow.

[dlb]

that looks great, mark.

an anecdote on the strength of even one screw: on the first tercel i fixed up, i had to remove the rotten old rear bumper. so i removed the four bolts but the damn thing wouldn't budge from the channel on the driver side. the passenger side was free. i pushed, pulled, swore, but nothing worked. i figured it must be really rusted in there on the one side so i fastened a chain or heavy rope to my wife's truck and the stuck rear bumper and directed her to give it hell. this was years ago now but i remember it took about a half dozen hard, jolting tugs with the truck before that bumper finally came out. when it did, i could see a scrape along the part of the bumper that sits inside the driver side channel. i looked in the mounting channel and saw the tip of a self-tapping screw sticking partially in there. i looked on the outside and found a previous owner had used the screw and some plumbing strapping to keep the end of the rotten muffler from flopping around. just the tip of that screw with a small amount of purchase on mounting portion of the bumper was all that was holding it, and it still took a lot of violent effort on the truck's part to overcome it.

my point is that if that stupid little screw took that much, i bet your bumper-mounted hitch will handle you towing your little boat around with no problems.

[Mark]

I tried re-installing the bumper today, but it won't go back on because the hitch is interfering between the bumper and the car body. At first the bolt in the back (circled in red) was pressing into the car body, not allowing the bumper to push in far enough to line up the mounting holes in the car frame. I cut the bolt shorter and removed the washer to try and have this "sticking out" bolt/nut as short as possible, but now part of the hitch itself (circled in blue) is pressing up against the car body.

trailer hitch interference.jpg

Tomorrow I'll cut that part off and try again. It seems like the metal frame of the bumper mounts pretty close to the body of the vehicle, without much room to allow for a hitch, unless the metal of the hitch is pretty thin.

[dlb]

if you look at jimcrazy's pics, you'll notice the stock hitch only comes part way up the backside of the bumper. i guess there's more clearance down lower.

[Mark]

I had a hard time making sense of his pictures since it looks different from mine. On his, there seems to be much more clearance behind the bumper or it's mounted lower. On mine, if I took the same picture, you would probably only be able to see the lower half of the large holes. Of course pictures can be deceiving. I'll cut away part of the hitch and see what happens tomorrow.

[Mark]

I tried installing the bumper again after cutting away material on the hitch and it was better, but still no good. I'll have to re-drill the mounting hole and mount the hitch lower like Jimcrazy's.