Hayman Reese celebrates its 70th anniversary

The tow bar. You see it everywhere in Australia, and more than likely that tow bar attached to the back of that four-wheel drive wagon or ute will have a famous Aussie brand-name stamped on it: Hayman Reese.

The brand is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year and, for most of us, it is like it has always been prevalent in the local motoring scene, to the point where the name is literally a byword for a tow bar. It’s amazing really, when you think of where it all began …

A BEGINNING YOU’D NEVER GUESS

It's all about happenstance, coincidence and wanting to help out a mate when it comes to the beginnings of an aftermarket brand that is now an icon of the Australian motoring scene. It is an origin story that is, if not quirky, certainly memorable and amazing rolled in to one.

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A customer picks up his Cruiser (c1980) with the Hayman Reese dual-axle kit for 45% increased payload volume

The quirky part? Before Eric Hayman answered a mate’s request for a tow bar, he worked making bicycle spokes in South Melbourne – yep, that’s right, pushy spokes. No, we can’t see the correlation either, but we (like millions of towing Aussies) sure are glad that Hayman’s original two tow bars (one went to his mate, the other he sold at a country show) soon became a whole lot more.

The successful sale (and the knowledge there was an untapped market out there) changed Hayman’s direction of work, seeing the establishment of a business that has expanded – and innovated, along the way – its product line and is now celebrating seven decades at the forefront of towing technology.

FROM ‘JUST TOWING’ TO SOMETHING MORE

For anyone over a certain age, their memories of towing are of a relatively simple but time-consuming process. Back in the 1960s and early ’70s, the tow bar was far from the quick and easy fix/detach set-up it is now (thanks to the 50mm square hitch – more on that later), with most tow bars bolted on to the vehicle, as Craig Smith, marketing manager of Cequent (the owners of Hayman Reese) recalls.

“I actually remember seeing tow bars bolted on to the underneath of the car,” he laughs. “I remember Dad getting ready for holidays; he’d pull the tongue out of the boot or the shed … and climb under the car and bolt it on. You sort of look back to think, shit, that’s pretty bloody archaic.”

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Hayman Reese in the early ’80s sorted out weight distribution levels to stop the rear of the car sagging when towing a ’van

And it was, but in the ’70s that all changed, with what Smith calls one of the big historical changing points at Hayman Reese: the development of the two-inch (50mm x 50mm) hitch, which allowed for the tow bar to be easily detached when not in use.

The development and introduction of the two-inch hitch was the result of the company being bought out by USA-based Reese Products (hence the name change from Hayman to Hayman Reese).

It was accompanied by a new weight-distribution system, owing to the fact caravans were getting longer, larger and heavier, as were the vehicles towing them, as Smith explains: “That was a game-changer – the 50mm by 50mm hitch – and that’s seen as being a Hayman Reese proprietary.

“Obviously it’s not, but it identifies really close with the company,” he continued. “ The other thing is the weight-distribution side business and that’s a lot of stuff we introduced from America and modified to local conditions.”

These significant developments were just the first in what has become a veritable conga line of innovative towing products aimed at keeping up with the advancement in not only vehicle tech but user demands, ranging from ever-larger caravans/campers, to off-road towing, to families throwing a bike carrier on the back of their sedan or compact SUV.

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Thankfully, Hayman Reese has been more than up to any challenge, thanks to a number of factors, including the major one of – still, today – designing, testing and manufacturing its products completely in-house at its Keysborough factory.

This is the company’s third premises; the original South Melbourne factory was superseded by a Dandenong site in the early ’70s, with Hayman Reese now notching up 10 years at Keysborough. It’s a complete in-house operation (with a staff count of around 300) and offers a huge advantage in terms of development times for new products.

HOW IT GOES DOWN, IN DA HOUSE

"Things get done in almost real time,” says Gregor Brown, sales and marketing director. “You don’t have the waiting for product to move from a different site or a different country. It comes off a computer, the CAD design is done downstairs and then the parts could be manufactured on the line within days.”

The Hayman Reese tow bars come with a lifetime warranty, so extensive testing is essential throughout the design and prototype stage, where the prototypes are thoroughly tested in a lab (and then on-vehicle), ensuring that when the consumer finally fits that new hitch/tow bar set-up to their rig, they can do so with optimum assurance.

The quality control around a Hayman Reese product is exceptional and harks back to the company’s ethos of continuing to improve and fine-tune a design right through to the moment it is ticked off for production, as Brown explains.

“Once a vehicle’s been launched, we would bring a vehicle in. We’ll measure it; we’ll fit it with a trial fitment. That’s where you do the tweaking. There’s so much that can be done in CAD and design, but then the tweaking comes from physically putting a bar on that vehicle and that’s when it’s a millimetre here and a millimeter there to be tweaked.”

This attention to detail has seen Hayman Reese improve even the basics of tow bars, such as the product’s resistance to corrosion. From the ‘old days’ of the bar’s raw metal being simply painted over, each bar is shot-blasted, then given a protective coat, before being powder-coated.

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Being so ‘local’ in its manufacturing and product applications also meant Hayman Reese was able to respond quickly to the unique towing (and recovery) requirements of 4x4-based touring – as well as the environment in which these vehicles are towing – as this pastime exploded in popularity, with the release of its popular X-Bar in 2018.

Designed to offer a towing and recovery solution for tourers, the ADR-compliant X-Bar sits higher up on the rear of the vehicle, ensuring departure angles are not affected (and often, are improved compared to competitor products) and is rated to 8000kg rear recovery.

For Hayman Reese, it’s another product opportunity that reflects Craig Smith’s comment around the “company starting out as a tow bar company, and now it’s very much a towing solution company”, and also how it has adapted its knowledge to that new challenge.

“I think X-Bars are really the example of products where you’re taking the traditional product (the tow bar) and then adapting and modifying it to needs as they change,” he says. “And more people are heading off-road and wanting to be able to tow, but also wanting to be able to four-wheel drive as well. We’ve been able to by-product both those needs.”

The X-Bar is just one of those adaptions and changes the company has been at the forefront of …

ON TOP OF TOWING TECHNOLOGY, WITHOUT FORGETTING THE PAST

As motor vehicles have become more complex, so have the demands on towing systems. From brake controllers to simple things like indicators still functioning on your camper/trailer/van, the abundance of technology in today’s vehicles has meant plenty of development at Hayman Reese to ensure its tow systems function in tandem with the tow vehicle itself.

This began in the early 2000s with the launch of the SmartClick wiring system, a vehicle-specific loom that ensures fitment and function of all related elements. Set-up is straightforward, through to its very impressive SmartCode system. As Gregor Brown explains, tech is, indeed, king in today’s towing world.

“That’s a huge piece now with what we refer to as ‘smart vehicles’,” he says. “So certain vehicles, you need to then code them once the towbar has been fitted. We have a tool that allows us to do that and that then means that all the functionality that is with that car is then maintained when you are towing.

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The Hayman Reese 70th Anniversary Hilux in the ‘Jig Jungle’ of old towbar welding jigs, in the Keysborough factory

“If you go and buy a new Ranger – or you buy a VW Touareg – they’re smart cars; they’ve got a lot of intelligence and as soon as you connect the trailer plug, the car then knows it’s towing. Whether it’s your parking sensors turning off, so you stick it in reverse and you don’t get deafened by a scream, because it thinks you’ve backed in to something.

It could also be the lane-departure warning system, or it could be a gearshift ratio change when you engage trailer mode. If you don’t tell the vehicle that it’s pulling a trailer, it won’t engage the right gear-shift profile.”

This focus on keeping ahead of vehicles as they continue to grow ‘smarter’ is testament to a company that is always looking forward but, at the same time, is not forgetting its core attributes – or, for that matter, it’s past.

After all this talk about the latest towing tech, readers may be amazed (and impressed) by the fact that, due mainly to Hayman Reese always creating its products in-house, it can still deliver a brand-new tow bar for a vehicle that is far from shiny and new, building it off the original (often hand-drawn, for very old vehicles) blueprints. And yep, that even applies to vehicles from the 1950s …

“If there’s a vehicle out there, if it’s an old Falcon, old Commodore, or old whatever, we’ve got the ability to make that tow bar,” Brown says. “We’ve got jigs … we’ve got what’s referred to as the Jig Jungle, where we have got all the back history for all these vehicles. If you were doing a restoration, or you happen to have that vehicle and you want a tow bar, we have got the ability to provide a towbar for it now.”

Yep, we agree, that’s pretty damn cool.

THE FUTURE IS ALWAYS NOW

It's been 70 years but Hayman Reese shows no sign of slowing down. It’s factory pumps out thousands of towing products each week and its designers and engineers are constantly working on even more ways to improve the towing process, whether that is to continue to improve its highly regarded weight-distribution system (which, itself, has undergone a number of changes as a result of changes in caravan design over the years; the company still produces its original trunnion-style spring bar set-up alongside its ‘newer’ round-bar spring-bar set-up, to cater for different weight ranges) or to continue to keep up to date with the latest electronic wizardry installed as standard equipment in new vehicles.

Plus, it will also (as it always has done) keep an eye on how the towing market changes, in regards to the vehicle types used, and what type of towing they’re used for, something Gregor Brown notes when asked about the future.

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“People want to tow, but the car park has shifted,” he affirms. “There’s a higher share of what we call light commercial vehicles and SUVs in the market now compared to what there was 10 years ago. I think that’s evident if you look ’round the car park when you’re driving down the highway; you don’t see the old Commodore ute any more – it has become a Ranger, and the Ranger has got more towing ability.

“From towing, we’re continually looking at where the future is, how the car park’s changing, and what the needs of towing are. We will continue to look at that. We will continue in SmartCode. That will get bigger and bigger as we work with the vehicles that come to market and understand how they evolve.

“That’s where we see the market going. Our focus is on that space of keeping on top and up to speed with the changes in vehicle capability and requirement.”

It’s both comforting and exciting to see such an established and highly regarded brand not wanting to sit on its considerable laurels when talk turns to the future.

AVAILABLE FROM: www.haymanreese.com.au
WE SAY: We reckon us Aussies will be wandering around the back of our rigs to attach that camper, caravan or bike rack to a tow bar with ‘Hayman Reese’ stamped on its side for many years to come.