Hello all,

 

Im driving my dads old 51 reg fabia 1.9 sdi estate, it's not doing bad with 204,000 miles on it. It's proving to be a good economical work horse.

 

Well I occasionally buy and sell the odd motorbike for profit and have decided it might be worth me buying a little trailer, but I have no idea what I need for the car...i assume it's that ball thing that the trailer attatched to.

 

If anybody can enlighten me to what it is I need, the cost and the likely hood of fitting it myself (not too bad with a spanner).

Thanks 

wuyang

You will need a towbar kit for a Fabia estate (wagon), which contains a bunch of heavy steel sections to spread the load of the trailer across the boot floor, a tow hitch (probably 50mm ball, but other hitches are available, so it will depend on your trailer), and a wiring kit to make the trailer lights come on as required. Under UK law, you should also buy an extra rear number plate, to be attached to the trailer.

 

Installing the towbar kit and wiring is of variable difficulty depending on car, and I've never sone a Furbie.

Gonna be similar to a 9N Polo that I've just done.  Kit consists of a beam that replaces the existing rear crash-bar, plus two flat bars that bolt inside some fore-and-aft existing chassis tubes, which bolt to and secure this beam in position.  The towball bolts to the middle of this beam, and the electric socket sits on a plate alongside the ball.  The new beam has bits that make a U-shape around the bottom of the bumper, though you may still need to cut some slots in the bumper, but they're barely visible.

Wiring is not too bad, you hack into some of the existing tail cluster wires with Scothlocks or by cutting, tapping in a new wire and soldering or inline crimping.  To minimise the chances of the car electronics throwing a hissy fit, I bought a (multi) relay kit (e.g. this one) that makes sure there's no additional load on the existing circuits, but it does mean feeding a fused 12V back to there to power this relay module, which was a minor hassle.

I also noticed that they suggest a permanent 12V feed to this module, but they don't tell you that the module consumes about 65mA quiescent current, which is roughly 3 x what the rest of the car does, so you may wish to have it switched, or connected to an ignition-on 12V.

Edited 21 March, 20179 yr by Wino