Blue Ox Ascent Non-Binding Tow Bar Review

Products Featured in this Video

Blue Ox Ascent Non-Binding Tow Bar - RV Mount - 2" Hitch - 7,500 lbs

130 reviews

Code: BX4370

Price:  $1,274.90

• Tow Bar
• Hitch Mount Style
• Telescoping
• Aluminum
• 7500 lbs

• Stores on RV
• Non-Binding
• Blue Ox

This lightweight aluminum tow bar is easy to maneuver, with a swivel head joint that lets the arms twist left and right. Non-binding levers let you disconnect at the campsite, even on rough terrain. Extra-long arms help you make tight turns.

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Review of the Blue Ox Ascent Non-Binding Tow Bar

Hi there flat towers. Today, we're going to be taking a look at Blue Ox's Ascent Tow Bar. The Blue Ox Ascent is the lightest tow bar in Blue Ox's lineup. Weighing in at only 31 pounds, this premium tow bar is going to be easier on your back. It's able to achieve these lightweights due to the fact that it's made completely with aircraft grade aluminum. 31 pounds is almost astoundingly light.

Many of the other tow bars out there on the market weigh in nearly double that. So you're definitely going to appreciate it because every time you need to connect or disconnect, you have to lift these arms up. It's kind of on a pivoting system so it's a little awkward. So weighing in only 31 pounds drastically reduces the time because you're not going to have to work so hard to get it disconnected as well as the fatigue you're going to experience hooking it up and disconnected at each time.This tow bar is also a non-binding tow bar, which is really a feature that you should look for on any tow bar that you decide on purchasing. Whenever your vehicle is parked and you're getting ready to disconnect it, if you're not in a perfectly straight line on perfectly flat ground, there's a very high likelihood that you're going to get into a bind and it's going to be difficult to get your arms disconnected.

We've got our vehicle here now where it's in a bit of a bind here. I can't twist this pin at all, so there's really no way that I would ever get this disconnected the way it is. The lever here, when pressed down, will release our arm here so it won't be bound upYou can see there it's released and now my pin can freely rotate, making it super easy to disconnect it. Another feature that I really like about this tow bar is that it's self-aligning. So once you hook it up to your vehicle and you just drive off and the three access design will automatically place the vehicle behind you, extend the arms and lock it in place, making sure that it tracks directly behind your vehicle.

Blue Ox has also increased the length of the arms, which gives it a better turning radius. Additionally, over a lot of the competitors, we have dust boots located on the outside of our arms. And I personally liked the dust boots a lot. The dust boots will ensure that no dirt or debris gets on the shaft that extends in and out of our tow bar. So there's no chance that that could cause it to bind up or eventually not be as smooth as it used to be.A lot of the other competitors have exposed arms with seals that's supposed to brush the dirt off as it slides in, but with this, why put the seal in a scenario where the dirt could potentially get in it and past it when you can just keep it all out together.

It's designed to work with a span of 16 to 38 inches. So it should be a suitable tow bar for your smaller compact vehicles, as well as your larger or midsize SUVs. And with a weight capacity of 7,500 pounds, you'd be able to tow just about all of the vehicles except for your very large trucks. It has an attractive gloss powder coat finish that really pops with gold Blue Ox emblems on each side that just gives it a nice premium look. Being a premium tow bar, it also comes with a set of safety cables. These are seven foot cables with locking hooked ends on each side, they're spring loaded here to keep them in place, which is just one less thing that you need to remember to purchase when you're getting your flat tow setup, all completed.The assent is designed to attach directly to any Blue Ox base plate, but we do have adapters available here at etrailer.com so you could hook it up to another manufacturer such as a Roadmaster or Demco. When you're ready to use your tow bar, we're going to insert it into the receiver at the back of our motor home. The end here does have two holes, you can use whichever one works best for your application. We're going to be using the hole that is closest to the vehicle we're going to be towing. This is going to bring it a little closer. We're mainly doing this because we do have a high-low adapter in here and that's already extending the distance our vehicle will be away from the motor home, so this will just help bring it back and bring it closer. It can help minimize the length of the safety cables that you're going to need. So we'll slide it in, line up our hole, and then attach it with the included 5/8" hitch pin and clip.When you're ready to attach your tow bar, we'll take it up off of its storage position, we're going to angle it down and then we'll spread our arms apart to match up with our hooks on our base plate. We'll then pull the pin out, now we're going to slide the larger pin out, the arms then easily connect by sliding in our teeth meshed together there. We can then slide our pin back through and lock it in place. When it's done in the arms you want to make sure that the arrow on the outside is pointing up and then that the top here is the top.We can now install our included safety cables, so we're going to hook it onto our base plate here on the vehicle. And since this is the passenger side we just hooked to, we're going to hook it to the driver's side on our motor home. This is going to create a cradle underneath of our tow bar here. So in the event, we had a catastrophic disconnect, the crossing cables would catch this and keep it from digging down into the pavement. We're going to hook up our other safety cable in the same manner, criss-crossing it. And now we can hook up the rest of our flat tow components, which is typically your braking system and your diode wiring.And now with all of our components hooked up, all that's left to do is to place our vehicle into tow mode and ready to hit the road. And that completes our look at Blue Ox's Ascent Tow Bar..