Don't Pull A Trailer With Your Motorcycle Until You Watch This | OLD VERSION

I'm getting ready to head to wingding in Knoxville Tennesse, about a three-day trip for me and I'm gonna be pulling my Bushtech trailer so I thought it'd be a good idea to talk to you a little bit about trailer safety and some things you want to make sure you do before you take a long road trip with your trailer. Now I'm going to be talking about things specific to the Bushtec trailer but these things will apply no matter what trailer you're pulling behind your bike so today we're going to talk about trailers on Cruiseman's Garage. I should also point out that pulling a trailer dramatically changes the handling and the operation of your motorcycle now in no way do i or Cruseman's Garage recommend that you pull a trailer behind a motorcycle because it will change the braking on the bike the handling on the bike if you choose to pull a trailer behind your motorcycle you do so at your own risk. Okay, I want the the tongue of the trailer to be just kind of right next to the hitch pin so I get the right distance for the chain I'm not actually going to put it on the the hitch-pin I just want it to be in the same position okay on the Bushtec trailer what we have is we have you can see here a couple of holes that have been drilled into this this welded on plate and there's a hole on each side so you can have two toed chains one on each side and then we're going to need the chain to go from here all the way up to this opening up here which is on the trailer hitch basically that we installed from RIVCO so we're going to get a piece of chain and this is my my chain here which I purchased at Ace Hardware and I made sure that the chain had enough strength to be able to handle the weight of this trailer so you want to make sure when you buy your chain that it has enough tensile strength to you know basically support the weight of the trailer when you're pulling it and that goes for all the other accessories too for example I have a spring link here that I'm going to use up here on the frame and I'm going to basically hook that in and that's what's going to connect to the chain and you'll notice down here this has a 260 pound working load limit so with two of these that should translate to over 500 pounds well my trailer fully loaded only weighs about 300 so that should be more than enough I also have these other little these little have these little ring clips I can't remember what these are called they come from a company called blue Hawk and I'm going to try to connect that up here into this this hole here so we're gonna put this in first connect our chain then we'll have to cut the chain we'll have to cut this to length hopefully I can do that with a hacksaw you I'm probably going to also get a wrench and tighten that really good so make sure it's really good and tight. So now I've got my chain my ring on the first side and I will eventually once I get this cut to size all to do the other side too okay I'm gonna put my little lock ring through there and now I can see how long my chain needs to be I want a little bit of slack in the chain okay so you can see here kind of how much slack I have in that chain I could maybe even go up one more link just to make it a little bit tighter in fact I may do that so basically what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to cut this link here that I've got looped through the and then once I connected here that should be pretty good and tight once this is on the actual pin and then I'm going to cut the chain for the other side and I'll show you how we hook all this up yeah I was able to use a hacksaw to cut this chain to the proper length so I was able to get the links and I did it on both chain so I have two chains now the equal size and now I'm going to going to put these into the bracket here and we'll run them up here and I'll show you how we connect these chains for maximum safety okay so now I have my two chains I'm going to I just like to criss cross them I like to bring the one from the left side over to the right clip it in here and then I'll do the opposite I'll go underneath or over either one and I'll clip this one to the other side so that they're kind of in a crisscross shape that way in a worst-case scenario if this tongue ever came loose from this pin it would seem to balance the weight a little more so let me go ahead and put that in there and you'll see kind of what it looks like once it's all hooked up. So one of the most important things you can do before you start pulling your trailer is to check the tongue weight on the trailer and that's the amount of weight that this tongue is putting on your trailer hitch now I use one of these little scales like you'd use for luggage you can buy these at Walmart or just about anywhere and I hook it right in there in the heim joint if you've got a different kind of trailer just hook it to the front of the little hitch cover that goes on to the hitch ball and then you just lift up and look at the weight and in this case it's pulling 25 pounds now whatever weight shows on here should never exceed 15% of the total weight of the trailer that's fully loaded however you know however low did you have it so in this case I could it should be 10 to 15% so if there's 10% 250 maybe 250 pounds for this whole trailer well I know for a fact that I don't have 250 pounds in this trailer because it's almost empty I've got a few things in there but not that much so what I'm going to want to do is shift the weight of the items in the trailer so that this tongue weight is lower now what that means is probably moving some of the things toward the wheels toward the back of the trailer the more weight on the front of the trailer the heavier this tongue weights going to be so you want to manipulate the weight in the in the trailer okay so as you can see there's really not much in this trailer right now I mean you know it's not like I've packed it for a road trip in fact I've just got stuff in here that I normally keep in here I get you know paper towels and in these containers here I've got some detergent and adhesives and some rags and things like that but you'll notice it's all at the very front of the trailer so if I move this back over the wheels you want the majority of your weight to be as low as possible and over the wheels you don't want it at the very back of the trailer the more you have it at the very back of this trailer the more it's going to cause your trailer to want to sway and move around so you want to have your weight distributed in the trailer as low as possible and aligned with the wheels of the trailer it's going to give you a much better ride down the road what you want to make sure before you connect the trailer to the hitch you want to make sure you've got your parking brake on if you have a DCT model if you don't have a DCT model make sure your bike is in gear you don't want the bike to accidentally roll forward or backward when you put the trailer on to the trailer hitch because that extra weight pushing on the bike could push it off of the kickstand once you have the bike on the in gear or on you know the parking brake on you can now put the trailer over the hitch this is a Busch Tech so it has they usually use a little heim joint over the pin but you throw your other trailers you would put the ball hitch in place just as you normally would and then you want to make sure to secure it in the case of a Busch Tech we use this little locking cap like that you want to make sure that it's locked in place I even like to lift up on the tongue of the trailer just to make sure it doesn't come off now we're ready to hook up our chains and plug in our electrical connector and then we're going to check all the lights you okay the first thing we want to do is check these running lights all the way around there's two on the left and two on the right you get the yellow one the red one also the tail lights should be illuminated when the bike is turned on you can see they're working and then we come around here to the right side of the trailer both the running lights on this side are working as well now we can check the brake lights and the turn signals okay first I'm going to check the brake lights do it a couple of times check with the foot brake and the hand brake even though it shouldn't be necessary and now let's check the left turn signal and the right turn signal you know tire pressure is one of the most important things you can check on your trailer before you take a ride so you want to make sure you check the pressure in each tire this one's about 10 pounds low so I'm gonna have to put 10 pounds in here to get it up to about 34 35 which is what bush tech recommends but you want to check the owner's manual of your particular trailer to find out what the pressure the recommended tire pressure is for your trailer tires now if you're on a bush tech trailer you're going to have to change the camber of your tires so that they're vertical up and down you don't want them tone in or toed out at the top and you do that using one of these loop pumps here and basically you connect this to this little air valve here on the trailer it may be different on your trailer and you pump it up until you get the tires on the trailer pretty much vertical and then you're good to go you may not have to do that on other trailers but on the Busch Tech you have that air ride suspension and you do have to adjust each time you ride now on my Bush Tech I have a an ice chest as you can see here with one of these little vinyl covers on it and I like to mount my ice chest backward so that the door opens this way the reason I do that is if I forget to zipper down this cover the wind can catch that if the ice chest is facing the other way the wind could catch it and blow it up and then you just got something catching the wind so I always like to mount it backward that way the wind is always keeping it closed if I forget to zip it up you also want to make sure that you've got your little snaps snap down firmly because you don't want to go down the highway and have this cover blow off so you want to make sure your eyes chest is secured if you have an external ice chest on your trailer regardless of the type of trailer you have I hope you found this video valuable and I hope it helps you perform you're trailering a little safer a little easier maybe more enjoyable there's a few of the things you want to remember when you're pulling a trailer you got to remember that your motorcycle now is about twice as long as it normally is so when you go to make turns or change lanes you have to be conscious of that you've got something you're pulling behind you now also when you stopped to get gas make sure you pull forward far enough when you leave the gas pump before you make your turn otherwise you're going to clip that little curb that protects the gas pumps could damage your trailer so be careful of that other than that also remember you're pulling two to three hundred pounds of extra weight behind your motorcycle that's going to affect your braking so allow yourself more time when it comes time to stop because it's going to take more braking power to stop your bike than it does without a trailer so in general you ride slower you take longer to break and just be careful now if you found this video valuable please take time to subscribe down below if you click on that little bell icon YouTube will notify you when we come out with new videos and put your comments down below if you've got some tips that might help our subscribers we'd love to hear about it so that's all for now until next time on cruise man's garage ride safe.

Channel: Cruiseman's Garage

Views: 191,715

Keywords: Cruiseman, towing a motorcycle, Motorcycle Trailer, motorcycle trailer, cruisemans garage, Honda, Goldwing, GL1800, Bushtec, 2018 Honda Goldwing, honda goldwing, bushtec trailer, hannigan trailer, gl1800 trailer, goldwing trailer

Id: sf8cpk3e3DU

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 20 2018