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Do you have a Winterhoff hitch?

If so you will encounter unhitching problems if the hitch is fully extended.  Once the caravan is stationary and braked you need to reverse back an inch or two to take the pressure off the hitch.  The ball and hitch will then separate quite easily.

had the same prob when we first picked up the hobby, took about an hour before we found the answer at 03:00 in the morning its the lasst thing you want to happen.

All in the fun of caravaning

same thing happens if the hitch is too compressed also ,i.e. if you have just reversed onto a pitch or into storage,

so after the van is braked up , you have to pull forward a touch to release the pressure.

stu

im bringing this old thread back up as we have been experiencing some unhitching problems ourselves :(

we were measuring up the car to the caravan today so we knew where to put stabiliser bracket etc...so we hitched up the car to van and could not un hitch...we went forwards and backwards jockey wheel up jockey whel down i sat in boot while hubby yanked on hitch but still it would not budge,we have an old type hitch which revolves 360 degrees very simple thing you lift up handle and its meant to release the towball not today :( when we borught van home last november we had trouble unhitching but we somehow were able to do it... we took the whole hitch of the caravan in the end! so poor caravan has a stump :( and the car has tow hitch attached to its ball..hubby has taken it down caravan shop to see if they can make sense of it...or maybe release it for us and maybe buy a new one :)

thank goodness its happening on our driveway and not when away or we would have to spend a holiday with caravan attached to car permanently,I had visions of my hubby going to work with it attached aswell!!

sorry for the waffle

Naomi :)

thanks for the reply David,the old hitch has been removed finally and a new one bought :) looking underneath we saw something was slightly bent and that could of been causing the unhitching problem :( so maybe she was due a nice new shiney hitch :)

thanks again

Naomi :)

I asked the chap in our caravan dealers workshop about this, we couldn't unhitch on our pitch last summer. He told me the caravan needed to be level to uncouple properly, I think this is cobblers myself but, that's what the man said.

BB

I dont know BB, we never have the problem on site and we go away a lot however we always have trouble unhitching on our drive which when the van is reversed on, the van is level but then there is a slight incline where the car is and it always gets stuck so we had actually put it down to the fact that the unit and the car are unlevel, as we have never had the problem anywhere else only on our drive!!