Sorry that the OP was hard to follow, but I was damn near frozen and fairly desperate at the time. Yes, although I've done it myself more than once, there was no room under the ball hitch to place a pipe wrench on the ball itself. If this was a story about a ball being stuck to a hitch, our big Ridgid pipe wrench probably would've been the quick end-all solution.
Thank you for this post, @Junkdrawer Dog. This is exactly what I was looking for when I created this plea for help thread.l0
If you read my suggestion carefully, you need to use the trailer jack to get the weight off the hitch assembly, it could have been as little as a quarter of a crank, maybe less to balance them both out where you could have chocked the trailer wheels and pulled forward to dislodge the two. This method has worked 100's of times, without fail, when followed to the "T". It's a moot point now, but if you should have this issue in the future, be a little more patient with the process and you'll get yourself out of trouble quickly.
I see that you're a fellow southerner, so I can tell you that living through mountain winters is quite a bit different than my days in the deep south. Back home, we sometimes experienced corrosion issues, due to the humidity we lived with, but the work "stuck" can take on a whole different meaning here - especially in sub-zero conditions. Nothing personal, but the word "patience" also has a different meaning under our nasty winter conditions as well.Originally from the northeast, spent years at the top of a mountain (7 feet of snow the last year before we moved south a little over 10 years ago), or 1/8 mile from the Ocean, and everything in between. Also had my own shop where you never knew what would be dumped, I mean dropped off at any given moment. I know the conditions of all of the above, and have over 250,000 miles towing various trailers behind my trucks and SUVs.....So quite familiar with your original situation, again, in various forms short of a full size Peterbuilt and 5th wheel, although I have had experience with locked brakes on one axle of a Mack sitting in the middle of my old shop......Oh, No, it's Mister Bill!!
In the end, the problem was a poorly-designed, cheaply-constructed, stamped-out Chinese hitch latch that doesn't even incorporate any form of cam action to move the latch mechanism. Once again, a ball hitch like this one has no place on a high quality American made equipment trailer, so the ultimate solution will be to bolt one of our Curt pintle rings to the trailer and go right back to employing the pintle hitches we switched to many years ago (for our heavy duty trailers). In fact, I highly recommend this type of setup to anyone who's ever had to go through anything like the stuck ball hitch story I did my best to describe in the OP.
By the way, I gave your post a like yesterday, so, once again, nothing personal intended. Thank you for contributing.
Artic storm, dark, I'm pulling the pin from the receiver tube as the one thing I can do without tools, quickly, and by feel to get my **** back in the warm truck ASAP.Sure, that was an alternative, but, at the time, we had arctic-like storm and, needless to say, it was very dark. For security reasons, we use grade 8 hardware to keep our normal pintle hitch rig in the receiver tube. The folks at the trailer lot used the same hardware when they installed the Draw-Tite ball hitch rig. Long story short, it wasn't a matter of simply pulling a pin. Under the circumstances, it was much easier to simply remove the cheap [stuck closed] junk ball hitch assembly - that the dealer sold me - from the trailer itself. No laying on the ice in the dark, which is something this old vet would much rather avoid.
I believe he said the receiver was bolted in rather than pinned.
Okay still one bolt vs many.
He also said he's old and didn't want to crawl around in the snow trying to get to the one bolt.
One bolt(nut) for the hitch ball or one bolt to release the ball mount from the receiver. One seems easier than the other especially when you don’t know or are able to figure out the size or how to keep the ball from turning.