MaxxHaul 80779 50" x 29.5" Trailer Hitch Mount Aluminum Cargo Carrier With High Side Rails With 47" Ramp For RV's, Trucks, SUV's, Vans, Cars - 500 lb. Capacity

This item showed up late Thursday night, a day early! The deliveryman was awesome! The item was everything it said it was! Very little trouble putting it together! The item is very well built and looks great! I bought some nylon washers to put between the steel receiver frame and the body of the carrier. You should never put steel and aluminum together, as steel will rot out aluminum. This product is well worth the money!

I used this carrier to haul my fishing cart as it has become difficult for me to lift it into my truck and it took up room inside. Well made, lightweight and was able to assemble by myself in about 1 hour. Box was a bit damaged from shipping but no damage to the carrier. All parts were included and instructions were pretty good. The size was a perfect fit for my cart and when the ramp is down, I can still access the back of my truck. It was a bit more than what I wanted to spend but now that it is in operation, works great and is a major help on my frequent fishing trips.

First off, you CAN make this so the ramp goes on the drivers side, which if you're moving a snowblower is what you want to do. Trying to load or unload into the snowbank on the side of the road is a bad idea. Also as someone else mentioned you should go buy two clevis pins and replace the bottom bolts in the ramp with them, now the ramp will fold nearly flat by removing the bottom pins and folding it on the top pins.Pros: Quite sturdy, though I wouldn't stand on it while loading anything. Assembly means you can put it together the way you like. Pretty light.Cons: The box was so full of aluminum filings it was mind boggling. Aluminum burrs across all metal surfaces that were drilled. Box contents were almost enough to build it (box was short a couple of bolts and a few were the wrong ones), instructions are a joke. Technically says "Max speed 55 MPH" but seemed unphased with a snowblower on it doing 70 on the interstate. Tie down eye bolts are flimsy at best. Takes an eternity to bolt together (over 75 small bolts to assemble).I know the cons list is longer than the pros list but it does the job with minimal fuss and the price is right. I have it on the back of a full size truck.

My brother and I were able to put this together in about an hour, but only 4 stars because no tools were included, and the instructions were not very clear. But when we took it layer by layer, it went together easily. I bought star lock washers to add to the structural nuts and bolts for some added stability, although the locking nuts may have been enough. I love the extra safety features: the reflectors AND the stabilizer bar that makes the carrier ride "rock solid." My brother was very impressed with my purchase, and the local Home Depot workers admired the carrier, taking photos to compare with their own carrier with which they were less than pleased. A fantastic value. I am very happy with my purchase.

Fairly easy to assemble. Loads of screws. Plan on at least an hour for this. Use a ratchet and screwdriver to make the task quicker. Base is steel. Tray and ramp are aluminum. It is large and awkward for one person to handle. It's not so much the weight but the size that may require 2 people to insert into your receiver. I use it to haul a push lawn mower. It works great. I have a utility trailer, but this is faster way to move smaller items without the hassle of towing a trailer. Definitely worth the money. I'm glad I have it.

Well built. Solid. Weight up to 500 lbs. lightweight.

I found that I now have a need to transport my 24" snowblower (Ariens Classic 24 model) to a couple places where I have volunteered to clear driveways for a charity and for some elderly and/or shut-in folks. Even though my snowblower is a smaller size at 24" bucket width, most competing car carriers only have a 20" width, or are 24" but that is OUTSIDE width, not INSIDE, so the blower would not fit on them. I picked this carrier specifically because it DID have adequate dimensions within the side rails to comfortably fit my blower (which by the way is 26-1/2" wide including those two side skids).Because of its width, it sticks out alarmingly far behind the vehicle, and I am using a minivan, not a pickup truck, with the carrier, so ground clearance at the back end of the carrier was a concern, especially on slopes, or pulling in and out of driveways and such. So, I bough a hitch accessory that raises my receiver hitch about 6".The carrier comes in a large and fairly heavy cardboard box. It was too cumbersome to pick up, and pretty heavy to slide on the driveway back to the garage; I guess UPS much have used a dolly to get it to my front porch. The carrier comes in four main parts; the base, the railing, the ramp (all of which are built at the factory from riveted aluminum extrusions) and the welded steel 'under-support and hitch shaft assembly'. Then there are a bunch of extruded aluminum plates of various sizes that you need to assemble as spacers between the base and the railing. This assembly task takes most of the assembly effort and time, since each spacer requires 1, or 2, or 3 bolts and nuts at each end. Due to the awkward size of the base, it is rather difficult for one person working alone to assemble this, but I managed with a lot of trial and error and general swearing. I used a box wrench to hold the nuts still while I drove the Phillips head bolts with a Phillips bit in my cordless drill. Be careful, those Phillips heads cam-out very easily, especially when you are trying to hold the drill at the end of an outstretched arm, and you can strip them before they are tight. The nuts are all self-locking types with nylon friction inserts, so you don't need lock washers.Two of the spacer panels must be assembled at the two rear corners of the carrier, because they have large red reflectors mounted on them. Because of how massive this carrier actually is, and how far back it protrudes behind the vehicle, it might be a good idea to add a set of brake lights as well for safety.One issue with any of these carriers is that whether steel or aluminum, they mostly all have either slots or holes on the bottom, presumably to save weight and to prevent rain from pooling up on the base and getting your cargo wetter than necessary. I wonder how much road salt and slush mixture will be thrown from the vehicle's rear tires all over this carrier, and since it is untreated aluminum as far as I can tell (from its appearance I don't think it is clear anodized). Salt is no friend to unprotected aluminum.....MaxxHaul's website says that the aluminum on this model 80779 carrier is "rust proof", but aluminum does not rust anyway, so 'fait accompli' sort of. Their website also says, "Rust and corrosion-resistant, outside element pose no match for this cargo carrier". I guess time will tell. At least the under-support and hitch shaft are constructed from steel with a powder coat finish, so that part is probably safe.After the above mentioned tedious and challenging assembly of the base, spacers, and rail, you need to bolt the under-support and hitch shaft assembly to the frame of the base, using six larger screws with washers and nylon-lock nuts; the screw heads here are metric Allen/hex drive, and it is really difficult to start the nuts onto the screws when you can barely reach both of those being one person, but it is do-able, depending on your virtuosity at cussing.Finally, the remaining assembly step is to put in two more bolts and lock nuts to act as hinges for the ramp section. The MaxxHaul website says, "Ramps fold down to basket when not in use", but this is not true if mine is any representative sample of the product (and, yes, I put it on right side up). The pivot point on the hinge is in line with the center of the base's height, and also with the center of the ramp's height, so that ramp simply will not fold down flat. I don't see any way to make it do so using the design as it is. I plan to visit the hardware store to see about buying a couple suitable sized clevis pins to replace the furnished bolts, so then I can just unpin the ramp to facilitate storage.The carrier's base has four steel rings near the corners to which you can attach hold down straps for your cargo. While the railing and sides are about 7" or so tall, you really need to invest in some straps lest your cargo depart your vehicle when you are not looking.The 'kit' also includes two small hitch pins to secure the folding ramp in its folded position, and a suitable 5/8" hitch pin for where the carrier plugs into your vehicle's receiver hitch.Once installed on my vehicle, it became clear that the ramp was designed assuming that the carrier is higher off the ground than it is on my van, even with the hitch raiser accessory. The beveled feet on the bottom of the ramp are WAY off of the proper angle where they rest on the pavement when the ramp is folded down. If the carrier was perhaps twice as high above the ground, those feet would match the pavement more appropriately.I had no problem at all rolling my snowblower, in its lowest forward gear, up the ramp and onto the carrier. But the ramp seemed like it was getting a bit rickety when both my couple hundred pounds plus the weight of the snowblower were both on it at the same time. I found that even with my snowblower fully ahead on the carrier as far is it will go, the tops of the handlebars collide with the ramp such that it cannot be raised quite far enough to engage the hitch pins to keep it up. I will have to rig up something for that. Again, even though I cannot fit on the carrier at the same time that the snowblower is up there, I have serious doubts that the numerous cross extrusions that form the bottom surface of the carrier would support our combined weight without being damaged. Keep in mind that the carrier is rated at a maximum DISTRIBUTED weight of 500 pounds. Put even a couple hundred pounds at any one point on this carrier and the aluminum will start being permanently bent. Also keep in mind that that 500 pound limit is STATIC load, not DYNAMIC load. If you drive on a rough road, or otherwise encounter sudden ups and downs, those dynamic loads might exceed the strength of the carrier even if the static weight is within limits. I think this is a much more significant issue with the relatively soft aluminum, as contrasted with the majority of such carriers that are made of steel. But due to the extra large size of this carrier, plus the ramp that most other carriers don't have, you will be glad that is IS aluminum when you are trying to carry it, or plug it into or unplug from the vehicle's receiver hitch by yourself. Which by the way is a fairly simple and easy task, since you can grab the carrier at any number of points between extrusions to get a good grip, and it is not so heavy that maneuvering it is a problem.A word on the manual. It is a six page affair all in English, and it is fairly decent English too....perhaps the Chinese manufacturer had no part in writing it. One cover page, two pages of legalese and cautions and warnings, then two more pages of assembly instructions with no pictures to help, and finally a page with the parts list and a well drawn but pretty tiny exploded parts diagram; all of the hardware (screws, bolts, nuts, etc) appear little bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, so not as useful as the diagram might have been. I had a bigger issue with the parts list, which lists parts that are already on larger sub-assemblies, so if you do a pre-assembly inventory you will seem to be missing quite a lot of hardware. Then, parts list descriptions are no better than "washer", "nut", "bolt", etc; without any helpful size information. And then a few of the quantities are wrong, e.g. 8 washers of one kind are called for but only 4 supplied (and used), same for some nuts, the 6 bolts (required to attach the base to the under-support and hitch shaft assembly) are listed in the parts list as only 4, and the 5 furnished "small supports" is listed as being 6 (only 5 are required).One more thing I can think of now is the "Hitch tightener plate" and associated U-bolts and other hardware. This can optionally be clamped over the carrier's receiver hitch junction with your vehicle to prevent carrier movement relative to the vehicle due to the inherent looseness of the receiver fit. Some other carriers use a more convenient design for this, which can go on and off quickly, but this one requires you to disassemble it with a wrench before it can be put on or taken off...inconvenient.So I think this is a decent product, but it falls short in some annoying and possibly troublesome ways.