How To Maintain A Trailer’s Axle

2. Maintaining A Trailer’s Axle

TOW-MAX are professional trailer axle supplier. Here, we’ll be teaching you how to maintain a trailer’s axle. Check out what is involved below.

2.1 Safety Precautions Before Maintaining A Trailer’s Axle

There is a checklist of things that you should bear in mind before you delve into the maintenance of your trailer’s axle. If you do not take cognizance of these things, you might end up causing severe damage to persons around the vicinity of the vehicle or even the products at the back of your trailer. To mention but a few of these precautions would include:

• Before trying to work on your trailer’s axle, ensure that you lift your trailer by its frame and not the axle or suspension area. In this case, when you have successfully raised your trailer, do not try to go under the trailer unless it is supported by jack stands. When you do not support the trailer with jack stands, it could lead to the trailer falling, causing injury or death to you or the persons around the vehicle.
• At the bottom of your brake’s backing plate, ensure that you remove the adjusting hole from the adjusting slot.
• Before trying to work on your trailer’s axle, ensure that you rotate the starwheel using an adjusting tool. In this case, a screwdriver would be rightly effective.
• After rotating the starwheel, ensure that you turn it in the opposite direction until a point when the wheel moves freely.
• Reduce the wheel to the ground level while you replace the adjusting hole cover.
• Ensure that you utilize all of the above processes on all the brakes of the vehicle.
• Do not make use of the trailer’s axle as your support
• Before maintaining the trailer’s axle, ensure that you do not touch the wiring or hydraulic tubing of your trailer
• While working on a particular side of your trailer, ensure that the opposite side is blocked before you think about jacking it.
• When you are trying to remove the vehicle’s tires, ensure that you loosen the nuts before the tire moves from the ground level.

NOTE: When trying to maintain the bearings of your trailer axle, there is a checklist of essential tools, and they include pliers, hammer, lug wrench, a flathead screwdriver, the jack, and the wheel blocks.

2.2 Steps To Maintaining A Trailer’s Axle Brakes

The way trailer axles are designed is to carry on a great deal of load. This is the reason why it is essential to maintain them from time to time. However, trailer axle brakes are pretty delicate, and you might not understand how important they are until you have to face an axle brake failure. This could be disastrous.

After you might have driven your trailer for an extended period, you must check in on the axle brakes in other to be sure about the vehicle’s functionality. It might interest you to know that the axle of a trailer is one of the few movable parts of a trailer, and the inability to properly maintain them could pose a lot of problems to the movement of your trailer.

In other to have an effective trailer axle brake, here are a few things to keep in mind:

2.3 Ensure That You Keep The Axle Clean At All Times

The movable parts of an axle should be kept clean at all times. It is not like the axle cannot accommodate dirt due to a long phase of driving the vehicle, but piled-up dirt and debris can affect the functionality of the axle.

You can use forced water from a hose to reduce the piling of dirt around the axle region.

2.4 Cleaning The Bearings

In a bid to properly clean the bearings around your trailer’s axle, ensure that you extract the wheels from the trailer’s axle and then remove the wheel hub to clean the bearings properly. You should note that it is essential to clean the bearings using solvent from time to time, which depends mainly on how well you make use of the trailer.

While fixing the wheel hub and bearings back, ensure that you grease them properly to prevent spoils as a result of movement friction.

2.5 Greasing The Axle

The axle of your trailer must also be greased while you are conducting your timeous maintenance.  You should note that the care of the axle guarantees the durability of the trailer itself. It also helps to prevent friction around the movable parts of a trailer’s axle.

NOTE: The main reason you need to maintain your axle brakes from time to time is so that they don’t accumulate moisture that could potentially damage them. The odds are that when you don’t maintain them regularly, the grease that you applied the last time you maintained them would be flushed out by moisture, and this could put you in a bad state while in motion.