HitchGoblin^™ is built in the UK by a caravan-owning engineer who got tired of guessing at nose weight.

My name is Stephen T Currah. I’m a retired electronics and software design engineer who’s come back to work to found HitchGoblin^™.

A career built on getting safety right

My career started in the 1970s, designing and developing safety systems, primarily for the petrochemical industry — including systems for weighing materials on the fly in chemical bagging plants.

I founded Currah Computer Components and conceived, designed and launched the Currah Microspeech (1983) and Speech 64 (1984), speech synthesisers that gave the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 a voice, selling in the UK and the USA under my own name. Since 1985 I’ve worked as a freelance design consultant, delivering turnkey software, firmware and electronics hardware solutions.

I also worked on early speech recognition — long before Alexa or Siri — used in biometric locks in the 1980s. I’ve since developed telecommunications products, home security systems, and smoke and gas detectors.

I designed postal scales used by the Post Office, and later pH monitors and systems for detecting and controlling toxic and explosive gases.

The nose weight problem, the hard way

I’ve towed trailers for most of my adult life, usually horses and ponies. These days it’s electric mountain bikes and a caravan, getting out to new places with my wife.

We’d carry the e-bikes on the A-frame, along with two steel gas cylinders and a spare wheel in the front locker. Overloaded? Quite possibly well in excess of 200 kg on the nose, in fact. But the car had air suspension. It looked level enough. Or so I thought. Dare I even say it here, but my wife did question whether we were overloaded — she even asked about the rear axle.

One day, not even towing, the suspension collapsed onto its axle stops. The air bags had burst, and the car could only be driven at 10 mph with the repair bill coming to nearly £4,500.

From kitchen table to production

That’s where HitchGoblin^™ started. I had every element I needed from a long career in product design, and it grew from a kitchen-table project into something real. Prototypes were built, tested and refined. Patents and design registration have been applied for, CE certification is complete, and the calculator app is launching soon, starting on the App Store.

What I hadn’t appreciated, until I went looking, was how important getting these numbers right actually is — and how little exists to help caravanners get them right.

Join us

If HitchGoblin^™ helps you stay safe while towing, it will all have been worthwhile.