For sometime I have been looking at various designs of adjustable or removable drop plates for my Lightweight / Range Rover hybrid. None on the market seem to meet my requirement for an occasional, easily removable tow ball at normal trailer/caravan hitch height leaving the NATO hitch in place for recovery and towing my ex army Sanky trailer.
I have now designed and fabricated one to exactly meet my requirements. As you can see from the drawing I took a standard Land Rover drop plate, welded it to an ex military trailer tow bar ring braced to the chassis with two tubular struts via rose joints. To prevent vertical movement a spacer block had to be welded to the top of the tow ring and ground down to exactly fit my NATO hitch. The tubular struts have bolts welded into them to fit the thread of the rose joints to allow adjustment, with another tube across the other end forming a “T” to take a bolt between lugs (two pairs of old spring hanger plates are ideal) welded to the rear chassis legs (I have now acquired two quick release pins to replace the bolts ). The electrics are taken care of by mounting a standard trailer socket on the drop plate connected to a military plug with a short length of cable. It now only takes a minute to convert to towing a standard trailer or caravan, and only requires the chassis lugs to be duplicated at the front for the attachment to be used for front end manoeuvring.
This hitch is designed to fit my coil sprung Lightweight hybrid and I appreciate that the rear spring hangers may get in the way of the mounting plates on a leaf sprung vehicle. It may be possible to overcome this problem by attaching the braces to a piece of “U” channel mounted upside down on the inside edge of each chassis rail.
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