torque from curt hitch/bike rack

I added a hitch right after I bought my car several years ago and, like you, I drove around always with a nagging worry ... what about too much weight? What about hard bumps? What about neighborhood kids using it as a jungle gym when I'm not looking?

The weird thing about hitches is they always rust, waaay faster than any other part of a car, so I finally reached the point a couple years ago where I said, all right, time to take that hitch off and get it powdercoated. And while I was doing that anyway, the brainstorm struck me, to take it to a hitch fabricator and have him locate a couple more usable holes in my frame channels about half a meter forward of the ones the hitch used. He welded a pair of extensions onto the sides of the hitch, to reach forward to that other pair of holes, so the hitch now has a four-point attachment, with a front-rear distance of half a meter to resist torque. Then I took the newly-modified hitch to the powdercoating shop, and put it back on the car.

Maybe that was overkill, but I can say I just don't worry about torque on my hitch any more, and life felt too short to worry about it the way I was before.

-Chap

 

From your post, I'm not sure, it sounds like maybe my point didn't quite come across. My conclusion was to extend the hitch attachment to additional points half a meter further forward, turning my former torque worries into non-worries, and then stop worrying about them.

It might be worth mentioning that what I had in my hitch was a platform-style carrier, which might even have had a larger moment of torque than a typical bike rack, so it was something I worried about, before doing the mod to make it a non-issue.