Home Forums Gear Hunting Trucks and Four-Wheel Drives Torsion Axles vs Leaf Spring

My experience is not with stock/horse trailers, so take that for what it's worth. Regarding horse trailers you've gotten some pretty good advice from folks like Sam.

Happy trails!

One thing I didn't see anyone mention is that with torsion axles you should pay more attention to leveling the trailer. They don't have the load equalizing ability that springs do. If the trailer isn't level, then one axle is carrying more weight than the other and you will wear the tires more or even have blowouts on that axle. BTDT

Jerry

This is exactly what I was referring to in my post. Jerry thanks for clarifying.

We ran torsion axles on the old boat's trailer. It did ride nice, and never had a problem with them being torsion. It had other problems, caused mostly by the fact that it was a triple axle and generally a POS.

The new boat rides on a tandem axle trailer with leaf springs. It clanks and clunks if you drop it off a curb, as the equalizers do their thing. Other than that, it is great.

Boat trailers are convenient in that you level them once, and then they stay pretty much static.

My flatbed is a tandem axle with torsion axles, and behaves as mentioned earlier - bouncy when empty, will lift a tire on uneven ground. Being a 30 foot flatbed, you have to pay attention when you load it - getting it out of level is easy to do and not a good place to be. Once you get that figured out though, I've got no problem with the axles.

With tandem axles and springs, it's said that a bump is just half a bump. The Equalizer between the springs will even it out so the trailer doesn't get tossed as much. Torsions won't do that.