Tongue Mounted Crossbar for Malone MicroSport Trailers - 78" Long

Video Transcript for Malone Tongue Mounted Crossbar for Malone MicroSport Trailers Review

Collin: Hey, everyone. It's Collin here at trailer. Today we're going to take a quick look at, and I'm going to show you how to install, the tongue mounted crossbar for the Malone MicroSport Trailers. Now, this crossbar is going to mount to the tongue of your MicroSport Trailer and it's just going to give you that third crossbar and that's going to be helpful for elongated loads, whether it's our paddleboard right here, or if we've got a longer canoe or kayak. We can get it on the trailer with having little overhang on the back side of the trailer.Now, right here is a good example of what our load looks like without that third crossbar in use. You see that our paddleboard right here fits on our two crossbars.

It's going to be secure for the trip, but we do have that extra four to five feet of overhang. It's always hard to take that stuff into account because it's not always that visible, especially when you're all the way up in the cab of your vehicle. Now with that third crossbar, we can adjust it to get that third point of contact for our paddleboard. Now you see we've shrunk it down to that one to two feet range, which is going to be very helpful when we're traveling.Now, also another use for that third crossbar is going to be if you don't have a truck with a longer bed and you got to pick up some lumber or other longer loads for a project, you're going to be able to use the trailer as well. Now obviously this wood isn't as long as you would probably need the trailer for.

We just wanted to paint that picture for you that if you don't have that truck, you can use the trailer for other things besides recreational use.Now we'll go ahead and take a closer look at the crossbar. It is going to be the same length as your other two, at 78 inches. One thing to keep in mind is that it's not going to increase the total weight capacity of your trailer. It's still going to be at that 800 pound mark. It's just giving you that third point of contact to more evenly distribute the load.

It's going to attach to the crossbar using a set of u-bolts and some plates. Then you're going to have some lock nuts on the other side. It's going to be very secure and the nice thing about this is that you can customize it and move it up or down the tongue of the trailer for whatever load that you might need it for. And the entire setup is going to have the same galvanized steel construction as the rest of the trailer. And again, that's going to help resist rust and corrosion.Well, now that we've gone over some of those features, let's show you how easy it is to get installed.

Now, the first thing you want to do is pick the spot on the tongue where you want to mount your third crossbar. What we're going to do is take one of our plates right here, put it under the crossbar, and you also want to make sure that it's even on both sides. A good way to do that, you can see it's balancing itself right now, so that's a rough estimate on it being level.But let's grab a tape measure and double check. So what I'm going to do is take my tape measure, measure from the frame of the trailer to the outermost part. Got about 21 and a half inches. Now we'll just double check and make sure it's the same on the other side. That's even, so now we can go to the next step.Now we're going to take our u-bolts and drop them through. One u-bolt is going to go on the left side of the trailer. The other one's going to go on the right. Now we'll grab the other plate and we're going to bring it up onto the u-bolts. Once you have it roughly on, we'll take our lock nuts and just thread them on to our u-bolts. Now let's grab our socket and tighten it down. We're only going to go up until the plate is making contact with the trailer. You don't want it pulling too hard on any of the corners. Now we're going to go ahead and double check our measurement before we get it fully secure. When you we're tightening it down, it may have adjusted itself just a little bit. We have that previous measurement memorized, so we'll just pull it out to where it needs to be. Here we go. Now we can tighten it down all the way. We're going to do the same amount of turns on each bolt. Start with three on each.Once you have all that tightened down, just double check and make sure that it's secure. Now we'll grab our crossbar. Now we're just going to set our crossbar right on top of the support bar right there. We're going to take one of our brackets, put it over the top and the holes that are on the support bar, going to feed it through those holes and then through the holes of the bracket. Grab a lock nut, just thread it on there and we'll do that for both sides. Now, on both sides we're going to pick up the crossbar like so and feed the bolt through the holes and under the crossbar and then add a lock nut.Now we can begin tightening down the lock nuts onto our bolts. We're just going to go until the lock nut is making contact. We still want to make sure there's play in our crossbar. Now, with the bottom bolt on both sides, we can go ahead and just snug those down. But again, you do want to make sure that your crossbar can move in the channel. Now before we snug it down all the way, we are going to measure our crossbar overhang to make sure it's even on both sides, so we'll measure from the outside of the bracket to the outside of our crossbar. We just want to make sure we get that even on both sides. Once you've gotten them even, we'll just snug it down all the way.Now we're going to get our D-ring installed. We applied a flat washer to the bolt right here. Just going to feed it through just on the inside of that hole. Now from there, we're going to take the lock nut and just slide it over to the bolts, line it up, and then start to thread it on. There we go. Now once you get to the nylon part of the lock nut, we're going to need to hold it in place somehow, but we can't get a wrench in there. So what we're going to do is take a pair of needle nose pliers, slide it in, and get a grip on the lock nut. Want to make sure we hold it tight, and we'll take our wrench, and begin to tighten it down and then repeat this process for the other side. Now we can just grab our end cap and just put that on. Just go ahead and push it in and you're good to go.Well, thank you all for watching. That's going to do it for our look at and install of the tongue mounted crossbar for the Malone MicroSport Trailers.