• A long-term co-rider with a short-distance butt tolerance,
• The long distances to scenic, safe, rider-friendly roads,
• Taking time for vacations with the family, or
• Short summers and heavy traffic?

Was your last trip to Daytona, Myrtle Beach, Sturgis, Americade, etc. less fun than it should have been because you:

• Had to take everything inside when you stopped for the night,
• Spent hours trying to dry out everything you brought,
• Were too tired to enjoy it when you got there,
• Lost your bike and/or other stuff to thieves,
• Had to stop or ride through a lot of rain, or
• Almost froze going, coming or both?

Was towing your bike to Daytona, Myrtle Beach, Sturgis, Americade, etc.a less than pleasant experience because you had to:

• Hang on to the wheel with both hands to keep from being blown off the road,
• Choose between frequent downshifting or constant over-revving,
• Stop for gas as often as you would have on your bike, or
• Drive slow to keep your trailer pulling straight?

Where do you store your bike and/or your trailer–is storage a problem because:

• You have to leave a car or truck outside to store your bike(s) in your garage,
• Your bike(s) are always in the way of your next project in the garage,
• Neighborhood restrictions prohibit storing trailers outdoors,
• Your trailer is too tall for a standard 7’ garage door,
• The neighbors complain about your ugly trailer,
• Moving your trailer around is a real hassle, or

You don’t have a garage or a trailer?

IRONHORSE TRAILERS MAKE BIKING EVEN MORE FUN

• RIDE MORE, SAFELY
• SEE MORE NEW SCENERY
• ENJOY MORE MAJOR EVENTS
• PROTECT YOUR INVESTMENT BETTER
• STORE YOUR BIKE SECURELY WITH LITTLE HASSLE
• ELIMINATES DRIVER STRESS AND LOW MPG PENALTY

For example, we have repeatedly said that you can’t put two Goldwings in a two bike flip top without running them through a grinder first.  But then along comes somebody who owns one of our two bike flips who says “yes you can”.  Turns out he was not only staggering them, he was taking both mirrors off one and one mirror off the other.  Then when he loaded the forward one, he was picking up the ass end and moving it as close to the wall as was practical, before loading the second one.

Here’s a staggered setup that will work for an Ultra and a Street Glide:

Street Glide Wheel Chock Positioned to Allow:

• 100 inches from the tailgate to the leading edge of the front tire
• and centered 18 inches to one side of the center of the trailer

Ultra Classic Wheel Chock Positioned to Allow:

• 112 inches from the tailgate to the leading edge of the front tire
• and centered 16 inches to the other side of the center of trailer

One of our two bike flip top owner routinely uses this setup to haul his Ultra and his wife’s Street Glide.  But he took it two steps step further.  First he had us install Cargo Buckles–automatic retracting ratchet straps.  Second, after we explained that with his drive-in step-off wheel chocks and his Cargo Buckles properly located, two-strap towing was a real possibility.  So he tried it!  Now when somebody asks him how he gets up front to tie the bikes down.  He has a very simple answer, “I don’t”.  Recently he won a bet that he could unload the two bikes and have them on the ground ready to ride in three minutes—talk about pain-free trailering!!!

When a tire fails–Typically the first thing you’ll notice is a fast, regular, low pitched drumming noise coming from the rear of your tow vehicle. A quick glance in the rear will verify that one side of the trailer is bumping up and down with the same frequency as the noise you are hearing. Once you’ve done that, you’ve got maybe 20 seconds to slow down as the tire carcass has cracked and allowed an air bubble to form between the tread and the carcass of the tire. If you don’t slow down, stop and change the tire, the tread will separate from the tire carcass, flop around and tear the fender on that side of the trailer, regardless of whether it is fiberglass or metal.

How to avoid tire failure–Tires with a severe case of dry rot are prone to blow outs, even used gently. To make bad matters worse, some dry rot is visible—very narrow random cracks in the surface of your tires. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as you can’t very well tell how deep the cracks are, and hence, how dangerous they are. Remember it’s a crack in the carcass that allows an air bubble to form between the tire carcass and the tire tread. So dry rot is really something you want to avoid.

While most people understand that unused tires eventually develop a severe case of dry rot, not everybody understands that infrequently used tires can also dry rot pretty quickly. Raising your tires off the ground or putting wood blocks between your tires and asphalt or concrete may  low down dry rot but it won’t prevent it entirely.

Why sound tires sometimes fail–The bottom line is that as tires and the air inside them gets hotter and hotter, the harder that air searches for a weak spot. So what makes tires get hotter? Black asphalt and 100 plus degree temperatures are a good start. Add trailers loaded near or beyond the design weight, rough roads and under-inflated tires and you’ve got a pretty good recipe for trouble.

What’s so bad about under-inflation? When tires roll, the sidewalls flex and the flimsier the sidewall, the more they flex. That’s why special trailer (STXXX) tires are recommended for trailers instead of passenger tires (PXXX).

The special trailer tires have much stronger sidewalls–that’s why they are so expensive. Regardless of which tires you use, the heavier the load at a given level of inflation, the more the sidewalls flex. Likewise, the heavier the load, the rougher the road and the faster you drive with the same initial inflation and outside temperature, the more the tires flex and the hotter they get—until one of those weak spots gives way.

Likewise the lighter the load and the slower you drive, the less the tires flex and the cooler they run for a given level of initial inflation and pavement temperature. That’s important, because according to tire manufacturers, trailers with ST tires should not be towed faster than 65 mph. However, our experience suggests that load trumps speed. Specifically, even though we install tires with a combined carrying capacity of 3500 lbs on both our one bike and two bike trailers, no one has yet reported a blowout with one of our one bike trailers. The bottom line is that while the owners of the two bike trailers often carry more than a ton of bikes and “stuff”, the owners of one bike trailers rarely carry more than half that.

Clearly, towing a fully loaded two bike trailer with less than its 50 lbs maximum rated cold (initial) inflation at 85 mph across South Dakota on a 105 plus degree day is a prescription for catastrophic tire failure.

Seven Steps to Blow-Out-Free Trailering

1. If your tires are over three years old and your trailer stays parked for weeks at a time,replace them no matter how good they look, how much tread they have or how few miles you’ve put on them. It’s TIME, not miles, that count.
2. If you park your trailer for more than 30 days, put wood blocks between the tires and the concrete or asphalt.
3. If your trailer has been parked for more than a month, check the tire pressure before towing it more than five miles.
4. Adjust your initial inflation pressure to match your load and the outside temperature. 35lbs for an empty one bike trailer on a cool day to 45 lbs when its fully loaded on a hotday. For a two bike trailer, 40 to 50 lbs for the two extremes makes more sense.
5. Adjust your speed to match the load in your trailer—at least 10-15 mph slower for twobig Harleys than one dirt bike.
6. Adjust your speed to match the roughness of the road and the outside temperature–slowdown if the road is rough or if it is extremely hot. Slow down even more if it is both.
7. Every time you stop, feel the treads of your trailer tires and your tow vehicle tires; if yourtrailer tires are hotter than your tow vehicle tires, slow down.

• Over two feet wider at the handlebars than our standard two bike trailer,
• Nearly a foot and half wider and half a foot longer at the floor level,
• A couple of inches more clearance for your bike(s) windshield. and
• Standard non-slip flooring inside and on the tailgate–the kind of
• User-friendly changes that create more usable space and
• Make loading and strapping your bikes down a breeze.
• With 15 inch wheels and only 200-300 more lbs,
• You can still move a loaded Widebody by hand
• And drive right on by most gas stations.

It’ll even hold two Goldwings side by side without staggering them and with plenty of room between the mirrors.  All this and it still sells for only $7995.

Many, many of you asked for a trailer with these capabilities.  We believed in your vision enough to spend the $100,000 up front that it took to develop the Widebody and sincerely appreciate the input you provided along the way.  Now’s your chance to see for yourselves how well we followed your advice.

Since all of all of June and most of July’s Widebody production is already sold, you might want to call and reserve yours before the waiting list gets any longer.

Yes, but what about the fact that there’s always a tow vehicle pushing the air out of the way in front of your bike hauler?  Yep, that cuts down on the wind resistance your trailer meets—some, but not as much as you might think.  Just remember  how much the wind buffets your bike when you tow it on an open trailer.  A trailer with a smaller frontal area will still meet less wind resistance than one with a larger frontal area.

Where can you get the drag coefficients for different trailers?  Don’t hold your breath waiting on trailer manufacturers to supply them.  And unless you work for a well known racing team, you probably don’t have access to a wind tunnel.  So where does that leave you?  Take a look at these published drag coefficients I dug up.

Shape                                  Drag Coefficient

Round nosed bullet                       .29

Sphere                                                 .30

2003 H2 Hummer                          .57

18 wheeler with fairing                  .65

Prism (triangle with depth)       1.14

Rounded cube                                1.20

A smooth brick                              2.1

Square-corned cube                    2.2

So how can you use this information?  Stand 100 feet back from the front of the trailer you already have or are thinking about buying.  If it’s seven feet wide by seven feet tall, it may be called a low hauler or low profile motorcycle trailer, but its frontal area is still forty nine square feet and it has a drag coefficient near the brick end of the scale.

Yeah, but what if its nose is not flat?  When it comes to frontal area, shape doesn’t matter, but remember the shape of the nose primarily determines the drag coefficient of trailers.  And if the trailer in question has a flat nose, it’s just like a big shiny not-so-smooth brick (too many corners, rivets, handles, etc.).   So you may as well plan on keeping your fuel card on the console next to you because you’ll need it too often to bother putting it away.

What about V-noses?  Hmm, a v-nose sounds a lot like a prism shape to me and that suggests a drag coefficient somewhere in the 1.1 to 1.3 range.  What if it has a downward sloping nose?  Suppose forty percent of the height of the trailer is sloped.  Then the top forty percent of the trailer will have a drag coefficient in the 1.1 to 1.3 range and the bottom sixty percent will still be greater than 2.0

A bulbous add-on to the top half of the front of a trailer has much the same impact as a sloped nose.  The top half has a reasonably conservative drag coefficient—probably a little less than 1.0, but the bottom half still has a coefficient greater than 2.0

Before you go, take another look at the scale above.  Notice that a round-nosed bullet has the lowest drag coefficient (.29) of all the things listed.  There’s currently only one widely available, purpose-built motorcycle hauler shaped much like a round-nosed bullet—Ironhorse Motorcycle Carriers.  No wonder their owners are so happy with their gas mileage and keep calling us saying—“you don’t even know it’s back there”.

Air density factor (another constant)
X    Trailer air speed squared (a variable)
X    The frontal area of the trailer (a variable)
X    Trailer drag coefficient (a constant)
——————————————————————
=    Force required to overcome wind resistance

If you look closely at the arithmetic above, a couple of things become clear.  First, air density is not a function of your trailer design or your driving habits.  It’s simply a constant for whatever air you happen to be traveling through—lower at higher altitudes and greatest at lower altitudes.  It’s not really something you can mess with.  For a given location, with minor differences for time of day, it is what it is. No more, no less.

Second, the other three factors that determine the total force required to overcome your trailer’s air resistance are much more interesting.  In fact, you don’t have to be a mathematician to figure out that:

A trailer at 100 mph on a still day requires 100 times the force the same trailer requires to overcome wind resistance at 10 mph.

A trailer with twice as large a frontal area as a second trailer requires twice as much force as the second trailer requires to overcome wind resistance.

A trailer with twice as great a drag coefficient as another trailer requires twice as much force to overcome wind resistance.

Clearly wind resistance should be a primary consideration in choosing trailers and tow vehicles.  Once you choose, you’ve pretty much determined how much gas mileage you are going to get at a specific air speed.  Keep in mind that air speed is ground speed plus or minus wind.  So maintaining 70 mph with a 30 mph hour headwind is as hard as maintaining 100 mph when the winds are dead still.

The implication for gas mileage is clear.  No matter what you drive or tow, the one thing that you can do to get better gas mileage is slow down!   At sixty miles per hour, for example, about 70% of the gas you burn is used to overcome wind resistance, and 30% rolling resistance.  And the faster you drive, the worse it gets!

That’s enough for now.  Next time we’ll get back to exploring how a trailer’s design determines its frontal area and its drag coefficient.

(To be continued.)

Naturally I asked several questions about brakes dragging, unusual tire wear, etc. but he had all the right answers.  Then he came up with the REST OF THE STORY—something I won’t soon forget.  He said “You know where I-24 crosses Monteagle east of here, there are seven miles of 5% grade down the other side.” Both were facts I knew to be true.  Then he said, “On the way back from Sturgis, I deliberately sped up to 80 miles an hour at the top of Monteagle and when I started down the other side, I kicked the Suburban into neutral.  Would you believe it slowed down to 20 mph going downhill with a motorcycle and a whole lot of other stuff on board.”  Not surprisingly, he is now the proud owner of an Ironhorse painted to match his Suburban and much happier with his gas mileage.

At any rate, that got me thinking about what really determines how hard a trailer is to tow and what role the design of the trailer play.  After a few hours surfing the net and talking to some of the folks from the U.S. Air Force Arnold Engineering Development Center right down the road from our place, I dug up some pretty good info. I’m going to share with you via a series of blogs.  This is the first of three.

How hard a trailer is to tow is a function of the total forces trying to keep it from moving forward:

Weight X Acceleration
+    Rolling Resistance
+    Grade (< 0 for downhill, > 0 for Uphill)
+    Wind Resistance
———————————————————
=    Total Resistance

Let’s look at the forces that try to keep a trailer from moving forward one by one.  The first one is weight multiplied by acceleration.  The bottom line here is that, generally, fiberglass and aluminum cycle haulers are much lighter than steel ones of similar size and shape.  So everything else being equal, fiberglass and aluminum cycle haulers are easier to tow than steel ones.

The second force that tries to keep a trailer from moving forward is rolling resistance.  Imagine taking a tire and rolling it down a long hallway.  As long as you continue to push it occasionally, it’ll keep moving.  But if you stop pushing, the tire will coast to a stop.  Rolling resistance makes that happen.  Now imagine you were rolling two tires down the same long highway.  Clearly you would have to keep pushing both of them to keep them rolling.  Two tires have roughly twice as much rolling resistance as one and four twice as much as two.  So everything else being equal, trailers with tandem axles exert more rolling resistance than trailers with single axles.

The third force that tries to keep a trailer from rolling forward is grade.  It can work for you or against you.  Think about that long hallway again.  If it slopes downhill enough, the force of gravity will overcome the rolling resistance and the tire will move faster and faster as it rolls down the hallway.  The reverse is also true.  If the hallway slopes uphill  enough you can roll the tire forward but it’ll stop pretty quickly and roll back toward you.  So everything else being equal, your trailer will experience less resistance going downhill than up.

The fourth force that tries to keep a trailer from rolling forward is wind resistance.  That’s where it gets really interesting because with respect to towing ease and fuel economy, the 800 lb gorilla in the room is wind resistance.  Exactly why that’s true and how it relates to the kind of trailer you have is a little more complicated than the things I’ve talked about so far.

That’s enough for now.  Next time we’ll explore what determines wind resistance.

(To be Continued)

Our WideBody is our widest, longest and tallest motorcycle cycle hauler and will accommodate two Goldwings, Ultra Classics or Visions, the largest motorcycles around except for the Boss Hoss and V-8 Choppers.  With a tailgate opening that is 90+ inches wide, a usable internal width at the handlebars of 101+ inches, an internal height of almost 64 inches, a usable internal length of 132 inches and a top that flips up from the rear, it’s very usable.  Goldwings with Tulsa windshields, Smart cars and T-rex’s are well within its limits, not to mention sidecar motorcycles, Can-Am Spyders, Thoroughbred motorcycle trikes and even some VW trike conversions and ATV’s.

Our two-bike flip top can handle pairs of bikes up to and including one touring bike like an Ultra Classic, Goldwing or Victory and one cruiser bike.  It’s important to remember that even though a particular motorcycle trailer has the internal width to accommodate your ride, you’ve still got to get it through the tailgate opening.  Surprisingly, this is not as simple as it sounds.  The tailgate of our two bike cycle hauler is 72 inches wide but the door jambs reduce the available width by another three inches.  Not to mention the stabilizer jack housings which reduce the opening by another two inches.  So the actual tailgate opening is only 67 inches wide.  Nevertheless it can easily accommodate Honda and Harley trike conversions and Can-Am Spyders, but side-car motorcycles and the exotic T-rex are still out of the question for our two bike fliptop, as are VW trike conversions.  .

In some cases, width isn’t an issue, it’s the length. For example, while the Thoroughbred will fit through the door of our two-bike cycle hauler, it’s a little too long for it.  While the trailer appears to be long enough, the proprietary hinge which enables the top to flip up is mounted exactly in the middle of the front of the trailer and is about a foot and a half wide.  The hinge combined with the rearward slope of the front of the body limits the usable length at the two foot level to 119 inches—one inch less than ten feet.  By contrast, the same two-bike trailers are routinely used for choppers nearly eleven feet long—as long as they are carried on the side, not in the middle of the trailer.

With a tailgate opening that is only 49 inches wide, our one bike fliptop motorcycle trailer is too narrow for anything except motorcycles, scooters and small atv’s.   It’s one heck of a single motorcycle trailer but it does have its limits.  A Boss Hoss really fills it up and if you want to haul a Goldwing or an Ultra, you or your traveling buddy better be thin enough to tie and untie the bike.  Nevertheless the one bike is wide enough for two scooters or motocross dirt bikes and, although we don’t recommend it, because it’s pushing the 2000 lb capacity limit, some people even use them to haul two Harley Sportsters.

Our one bike and two bike open chariot bike haulers share the same footprints as our one and two bike enclosed flip tops.  But since they are topless, there’s no flip top hinge to limit their effective length.  Likewise since there are no walls at handlebar height, each has a wider effective internal width than its enclosed trailer counterpart.  But the tailgate openings are identical.  All Ironhorse trailers are aerodynamic, fiberglass, lightweight, beautiful, fuel efficient and extremely easy to use.  Towing will never be as much fun as riding, but Ironhorse motorcycle transport trailers make it a heck of lot less painful.

Hopefully this answers your capacity questions.  If not, get the specs for what you want to haul and call us at 931-668-8860.

How do you get serious about bringing a brand new fiberglass trailer  to market?  There are two ways.   One way requires someone to sit down at a high end 3-D CAD station for countless hours and design and redesign until you have a shape that appeals to you.  Then the computer takes a series of vertical slices through the 3-D image, scales the dimensions up to actual size, and produces drawings for each slice.  Drawings which can be used used to fabricate a skeleton out of plywood, a skeleton which can be overlaid with foam or wood to build a rough facsimile of your design.   Gallons and gallons of bondo and primer, many square yards of sandpaper, and hundreds of hours of hand sanding later, you wind up with a facsimile so precise that you can take a mold directly off it.  This is the high budget way that many well known high volume boats companies currently use to design boats.

[singlepic id=1 w=320 h=240 float=center]

But after a year of doodling, we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted the WideBody to look like and what its dimensions would be.  What we didn’t have was the kind of capital that today’s high volume boat manufacturers have.  So we took a much more direct route, much like boat manufacturers before 3-D CAD came along.  First we fabricated a metal chassis.  Then we built a wooden box on that chassis the length, width and height of the motorcycle carrying part of the trailer.  Next we took a top from one of our fliptops, split it down the middle and inserted a new panel a couple of feet wide between the two sides of the top and front.  At that point our approach and the CAD approach converged.  We glued foam on the fender and handle areas we wanted to add bulk to and shaped it with knives and sandpaper.  After that, we bondo’d and sanded until we wound up with a facsimile for the body, top and tailgate that met our dimensional requirements and looked like the picture we had in our heads.  We colored the actual photos of the facsimile we’re using to announce the WideBody simply because Bondo isn’t all that attractive.

We’ve had our about 2.5 people committed to this project since Sturgis but the end is finally in sight. As soon as the eight gallons of special purpose primer we ordered a couple of weeks ago arrive, we will spray it on the facsimile—then sand it with progressively finer sandpaper until its surface is mirror smooth. Then and only then will we be able to apply the tooling gelcoat, fiberglass and superstructure that we’ll use to make the actual mold.

As a now proud and cash rich owner of a Iron Horse trailer I cant stop talking about it. I recently sold my old box trailer that was used to carry my 2003 Gold wing and bought a Flip Top Single Motorcycle trailer from the Ironhorse Trailers.

Our old box trailer was sold to us from the Honda dealer where I bought my Gold Wing, although nice to start with it soon turned out to be a dog. It was steel framed and rust soon appeared in corners and around welds. But that we could deal with, the cost of towing it with our 2001 V8 Toyota Tundra was ridiculous.

The cost of towing the box trailer soon put a stop to our monthly long weekends away with the Gold Wing thanks to the $3.50+ per gallon gas prices coupled with the 8-9 mpg we got towing this beast. The box trailer was also a nasty thing to tow, nearly every time you passed a semi the thing would start fishtailing and become very unstable.

Now we are back out on the road nearly every 2 weeks, the Tundra now achieves a gas mileage of and amazing 13 mpg at an average speed of 60 mpg on the highway towing the aerodynamic and stylish Flip Top, plus it turns heads, looks great, and keeps my prized Gold Wing in comfort while she travels to her next adventure.

John Jenkins