WILEY's New Lawn Tractor Hitch

20 May 23 Update:

The finished product. The hitch is very heavy steel with nice powder coating. There are 3 pins with cotter keys that can be set in 6 different holes, plus the hitch ball bar has its own hitch pin, offering several different ball heights. All we need to do now is measure the ball height of all 7 trailers and find out which holes would work best. There is also an attachment tab at the bottom for the garden cart.

Will this work on your mower? We know it works on a 2020 John Deere E130. The big question is can you reach up inside the mower frame with a wrench to tighten the brace arm brackets. Those brackets are important, they help distribute the tongue weight, which would otherwise easily bend the frame flange at the bottom. Our max tongue weight on our trailers is around 90 pounds. 

04 May 23:

Skipper got a new adjustable hitch for her John Deere E130 named WILEY. We tried a hitch on the front bumper for a bit but found that we preferred a rear hitch. The thin metal on the rear hitch would bend under a small boat trailer tongue load, so we found the ECOTRIC Heavy Duty Steel Adjustable Lawn Mower Trailer Towing Hitch on Amazon that seemed like it would work.

(Image: Amazon)

The hitch components are well made but showed up without assembly instructions. We figured it out though be referring to the photos on Amazon. Check your mower to make sure you can reach up inside the frame to tighten the hardware, there was plenty of clearance inside on WILEY's frame and all of the holes lined up.

Skipper tested out the hitch on the work dolly first, the hitch worked great!

Hitch Video: https://youtu.be/Wgkxc24QHbY

We'll get a close up of the installed hitch as soon as I can get Skipper off of the tractor, she had to do some donuts on the driveway first.