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Hello neighbors, it's Brad here at Etrailer, and today we're taking a look at the Etrailer Tongue Weight Scale. Towing can be a very rewarding and fun experience, and a lot of that comes down to having confidence while driving. If you're a little nervous while doing it because you're not sure of your load or your trailer or vehicle, it can get a little nerve wracking. And while there's certain things that you can't control, whether it be weather or other drivers, making sure that you have all your equipment set up properly is gonna give you a lot more confidence and make it a lot less stressful when towing. Now something that's overlooked quite often is your tongue weight. Many times people say you need to check your tongue weight to make sure that it's safe, but how do you actually accomplish that Well, with our tongue weight scale, we're gonna show you how to do that and make sure that you're preventing something kind of scary happening, something that you wouldn't notice happening until you're on the highway.
So let's get you safe and towing properly. So what is tongue weight Well plain and simple, that's the weight that the coupler with the trailer loaded up is gonna put on the actual ball mount itself. So your trailer and your vehicle have a tongue weight rating, and you wanna adhere to that. But the problem is how do you figure that out Well, that's pretty hard to do unless you have a scale. Now, ideally you want 10 to 15% of your entire load of the trailer as your tongue weight.
And that's gonna give you that proper balance to make sure that your load's not gonna sway, oscillate or give you problems braking or turning with your vehicle. So the tongue weight rating on a vehicle should be on your hitch. You're gonna wanna check that number, and you're also gonna wanna check the tongue weight rating for the vehicle itself. So check your owner's manual to see what the vehicle's rated at, and we're gonna wanna make sure that we stay below that. So knowing that we need to stay at a certain rating on our vehicle to stay safe, making sure that that trailer isn't overloading it, is really going to keep you nice and safe.
So looking at basic weight distribution, this trailer essentially is on a fulcrum. You have your tires here and your tongue up there. So as I'm back, this will tilt up taking some of that tongue weight off, which seems great, but having less weight on your tongue can be a very scary situation. This back here can cause a trailer to oscillate and sway while driving on the highway. And unfortunately, to bring that back into a straight line while driving can be a very terrifying and extremely dangerous situation.
So as I move to the front, this will obviously put more weight on the tongue itself. This puts a lot of stress and strain on the vehicle when braking or turning, and also is not exactly safe for your braking system. You don't wanna overload that. So having this well set up, this is gonna keep everything nice and balanced. It's not to gonna overdo the vehicle towing, and also it's gonna keep you traveling straight without any hiccups with the trailer. So let's take a look at tongue weight in action. So here we've loaded up four-wheeler on our trailer and let's take a look at the scale and see what it's looking at. Our Sportsman weighs 730 pounds, which most of that is on our tongue weight right now, because we're loaded all the way up on the front of the trailer this puts our tongue weight at about 550 pounds. That is way too much. We can alleviate this by moving the four-wheeler. So let's take a look at that. Now with our load moved back behind the rear axles, this also creates a tongue weight that's not ideal. In fact, there's nearly nothing. So that's gonna cause a lot of issues when driving and this is gonna be swaying all over the highway. So our sweet spot is gonna be 10% of the load loaded up. So with our 730 pounds, 10% of that is gonna be 73. Now each tick on here is 50 pounds, so let's try to get this dialed in by moving the four-wheeler a little bit forward. We're pretty centered up over our axles, so now let's take a look at that tongue weight and see how much has changed. It looks like we're right in about a 100 and that's gonna put us in that sweet spot for our 10 to 15%. Now during this process, you're gonna wanna make sure that your trailer is level and you can take a level and put it on the tongue and see where you're at. And you also wanna make sure that your tires are chocked when putting a load up there. N