A jockey wheel / nose wheel enables easy manoeuvring, coupling and uncoupling of your trailer. It also ensures that the trailer cannot fall over while being pulled by a vehicle.

It is essential to maintain your trailer’s jockey wheel, especially if it is exposed to heavy loads and long periods of time. This is to prevent it from failing and breaking, which can have disastrous consequences for your caravan, trailer or cargo.

The main cause of noises, thuds and bumps while driving your trailer is hardware that is too tight or loose, damaged, worn out or not installed correctly. If you don’t know what is causing the problem, you can check your equipment for wear and tear by pulling your trailer away from its hitch and inspecting each piece of hardware. Then, grab the gear strut and try to move it sideways and up and down to see if you can feel any movement or hear any thuds.

There are many different reasons for trailer failures, such as excessive loading and overheating, improper use of components and poor construction of the trailer. However, one of the most common causes is a defective or damaged jockey wheel / nose wheel.

When a trailer’s nose wheel breaks down, it can cause severe damage to the caravan or trailer and even lead to fatal accidents. It is therefore very important to keep your trailer’s nose wheel in good condition, and this article will provide you with tips on how to do so.

A nose wheel for trailers støttehjul til tilhenger is a support that is attached to the front of a car trailer. Its primary purpose is to help the driver steer and control the trailer when it is not coupled to the tow vehicle. It is usually made from galvanized steel and has a high load capacity. It is also very easy to repair or replace.

The investigational method consists of the redesign, topology optimisation and scaling-down of the AHRLAC nose wheel fork to account for DMLS manufacturing, the DMLS production of a scaled-down Ti6Al4V(ELI) nose wheel fork as an experimental prototype, mechanical testing, failure analysis and interpretation of results. No failure was observed on the AHRLAC Ti6Al4V(ELI) prototype under the maximum static Z-load case and, therefore, it can be concluded that a topologically optimised nose wheel fork manufactured through SLM can handle extreme static loads.

FEA maps of the principal stress distribution on the surface of the scaled-down Ti6Al4V(ELI) fork are shown in Fig. 14. The coloured areas represent the zones of high stress concentration, while the white areas indicate the regions of low stress concentration. It can be seen that the FEA model accurately predicts the principal stress distribution on the surface of the prototype, which is in agreement with the experimental results.