Under Trailer maintenance is a major part of keeping your Caravan or Camper trailer in tip top condition ready for your next offroad adventure. This article will show you where to grease, what to grease, and how to avoid a few problems particularly with stabiliser legs. Now, stabiliser legs often are the most abused component on a camper because people tend to think that you can take the whole weight of the camper or caravan with these. We are going to tell you some reasons why they’re not designed to lift the full weight of a camper.
Below are some step by step instructions to follow:
1 – Remove the dust cover.
Get a screw driver, wedge it in, take the black cover off, and expose the gears inside the little stabiliser leg here. Now you will see on the gears is what’s called a roll pin. The roll pin actually locates these gears and fixes them in place on the shafts. As you’ll see the roll pins only about four or five millimetres in diameter. Think about it, four or five millimetre pin holding up one and a half tonne of camper or two and a half tonne of caravan. It just doesn’t work.
That’s why we call them stabiliser legs, not a lifting leg.
2 – Grease
Step one, get a finger full of grease. Step two, get some grease in on the gears. Work it amongst the teeth. Getting plenty in there. Now, your good to put the cover back on, and away you go. Another handy thing you can do to make sure that these guys last a lifetime is when you set up your trailer, your camper, or your caravan, make sure you chock the wheels front and back. You don’t want any forward or backward rocking that will start the stabiliser leg moving because what can happen is the pins inside here can be bent. Then when you’re packing up to go home, all of a sudden yourblue handle won’t pull out, it’s jammed, and you’re pulling the bolts out of the mechanism just to get your camper home.
Also, when you set up on uneven ground if you find yourself setting up with a stabiliser leg at an angle, don’t over tighten it, don’t over wind it. The leverage will start to try and bend the pin and the same problem again., you bend the pin, you’ll have trouble getting your stabiliser leg out. Look after these guys and they’ll look after you. Don’t go trying to lift the whole camper or wheel off the ground. It’s not what it’s designed for. You’ve seen how small those roll pins are. Four, five millimetres of steel is just not enough to lift one point five tonne. Look after them.
Look after these guys and they’ll look after you.
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Don’t forget the Masterclass series is on video for you to watch here. But, above all, if you have some kind of handy hint similar to this that you think will help other campers and MDC owners, send us an email suggestions@marketdirect.com.au and we’ll turn it into a video and spread it to the rest of the world.
Happy camping and Escape with Confidence
