How To Adjust Trailer Brakes the Easy Way

[Music] [Music] hey guys hope you are doing good today we're going to cover another trader repair video and this video we're going to talk about trailer brakes specifically manual electric trailer brakes the question i get asked almost every day is how to adjust my electric trailer brakes the question i have for you when is the last time that you've adjusted your trader brakes i find that many people have no idea that you have to do a manual adjustment on manual trailer brakes so today we're going to cover the process of that explain the importance of it for safety reasons and to save you some money down the road so we'll get started here shortly we'll go over a few tools and we'll get get to it so what we have here we have a 12x2 7k electric brake setup i've made a cutaway here of the drum so you can see the inner workings of the brake assembly so to maybe better understand when we're making adjustment what we're doing you have the electric brake magnet here this is what actuates and pushes the brake shoes out when you hit your brake pedal this is the adjuster which is what we'll be making adjustment on to have proper adjustment in our brake shoe and drums this is the adjuster spring we're going to move around to the back here shortly and i will go over the tools that we use and how we do it but first we're going to back the camera out i'm going to show you on the drum kind of how to what to listen for so on this drum these brakes have been seated in so again this is a just a preventative maintenance adjustment but as i spin the drum you can hear very little contact you hear a little but not enough so we're going to cover how much drag or friction that you should have because you can too much is bad but too little is just as bad so let's move the camera around to the back we'll go over the tools and let's make this adjustment so here we have two different break adjusting spoons this one looks really cheap it's very thin obviously this is thicker but i will tell you this one is a good tool and we use this just as much as this one it's made for two different setups you know if you have multiple trailers it'd be good to pick up both of these even though this one does look kind of cheap it this is actually what we're going to use on this setup here because it works better than this so if you look on the back side of the brake assembly this is the backing plate which is the hole brake assembly you'll have two holes these holes sometimes have a rubber plug in them these plugs are missing like we see many times if it has a rubber plug you'll just pop the plugs out and you'll take the tool and you'll put the tool in and you're going to feel and what you're feeling for is a little star wheel so here can't feel nothing here i can feel the little teeth on the star wheel and we're going to make the brake adjustment and then we'll move the camera around to show you what we're doing so to adjust the brakes we're going to feel a tooth and grab it and we're going to pull up on it and it's going to sound like you're tearing stuff up and breaking stuff but that's just part of it and every time we click it up it's making a little tighter so now we're going to move the camera around to the front as i'm adjusting it you can see the actual star wheel moving then i'm going to spin the drum so that you can see the brakes are getting tighter and then we'll show you the final adjustment on that so as you're adjusting you're going to want to spin your drum some to feel contact and this one is way out of adjustment as many that we see so it's going to take us a little bit to get there [Music] so now we have some contact we have drag that's a little bit too much drag so depending on which axle manufacturer you have some manufacturers will say adjust it out until you can't move the drum then back it off 10 times from my experience we we adjust it till we get pretty good friction we back it off until there's just a slight drag on it and what is very important if you're doing whether you're doing two breaks or if you're doing a tandem axle you want all of them to be the same you want to make the same adjustment so they're grabbing equally so to back this off we're going to stick the spoon back in but instead of going up we'll actually pull the spoon down and reverse the wheel down which is the hardest part to do sometimes it's very difficult to get to go down it will make some loud noises like it feels like you're breaking it you're not so we'll go down a couple times now let's feel the drag on that see how loose that is now so that's that's too little drag so it's a fine adjustment so we're gonna go back up just a little more or check it again and sometimes one or two clicks is all you're gonna need so let's do one more maybe [Music] see that's got pretty good drag on it right there i would say that's a good adjustment again if you get it too tight all you got to do is back it off and again make sure you get them all adjusted properly so now that we've got our brakes adjusted and really it's not that big of a deal to adjust it many many people can can do it yourself it's something you know if you if you don't want to tackle yourself it's something you do need to take it to a qualified shop to do but it's something that needs to be done two things that's going to happen it's going to save you money if your brakes are not properly adjusted you're going to overuse the magnet you're going to crank up your brake controller because you feel like your brakes are not stopping good enough you're going to ruin the drum and the magnet surface and it could cause a hub loss which would be an axle failure at that time you need to adjust these every 3000 miles once they're seated in again this was a preventative maintenance adjustment on this axle this is not a new axle not a new install every 3000 miles that might seem like a lot but but it's not just just get them adjusted properly here we have a couple of good examples of improper brake adjustment on this drum on the face where the magnet rides you can see some very heavy grooving here due to the fact that the shoes were not adjusted out properly brake controller being turned up to compensate for that and the magnet doing all the work this actually caused overheating small fire and caused an outer bearing loss and a failure as we move over to the brake assembly you can see how bad a shape that the magnet is in very loose on the arm and it's very thin trying to do all the work so again this shows the importance of just doing your brake adjustment over 3000 miles i hope this video was helpful if you have any comments please share those below if you have any ideas for videos that you'd like to see concerning trader repair please let us know that please click to subscribe give us a thumbs up we appreciate it see you soon [Music] you

Channel: The TrailerSmith

Views: 78,032

Keywords: adjust electric trailer brakes, adjust trailer brakes, adjusting electric trailer brakes, adjusting trailer brakes, drum brake adjustment, electric brakes for trailer, electric trailer brakes, how to adjust electric trailer brakes, how to adjust trailer brakes, trailer brake adjustment, trailer brakes, trailer brakes adjustment, trailer brakes not working, brakes, electric brakes, adjustment

Id: ClNp8T9cGo4

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2022