How to change ALKO Hitch friction pads

I already welcome back to the storage center it's a beautiful September day today enjoy the last few days of Sun and it's extraordinarily hot today that said I'm up here doing a couple of important jobs around the caravan and one of those important jobs is changing the friction pads over on the hitch so before I'll show you how we do this let's just go through some of the theory on how it works and then I'll show you how quickly and how easy it is to change these pads over and then afterwards I'll show you how we can clean these up as well if they're any good and what we can do to prolong the life of them going forward as well so let's go and have a look at the hitch and see how they work so this is the hitch that we have here we've got a big red stabilizer handle here go back to that in a minute and this is our actual hitch handle here when we put the caravan on the car we also you lift this handle here lower the mouse down and then this locks back in place this is our stabilizer here and what happens is as we pull this down and you can probably see this gap here closing up and as I lower this handle down what happens is it pushes a couple of these pads here onto the ball and that's what gives us our stabilizer so to do this is incredibly easy what you'll do is you'll purchase your replacement pads and I'll put a link to those in the description below and the only toy you're going to need is just a flat bladed screwdriver so we're going to take the black cap off the end the protective dust cover and that exposes the back of the friction pad inside then with a screwdriver again just at the side pushing in on the back of the pad give it a whack it fall down onto the floor and there is our old pad take your new pad and put it inside the hitch and push back until it goes click insu see the back of the friction pad there and then just replace the dust cover and that's one side done now we do exactly the same on the other side let me show you the difference between the worn pad and the brand-new pad as well so you see here that if you take the condition of the the surface there you can see this one's got quite a lot glazing on it I'll show you how we can remove that in a minute if you actually look at the wear you can see that this dishing effect here is a lot wider than this one here this will not see being the brand-new one so if we would clean this surface up and make it nice and clean you know we could reuse these ones and in fact there are available on the market shims which fits over the back of the pad here and it just pushes the pad a little bit further onto the ball which means that we get a little bit more wear out of it so if I was to clean this surface up and we were to use a shim this would be absolutely fine to reuse I'm not going to because I've got a brand new pair here anyway and these I think you're as old as the caravan so we're going to use the new ones anyway but I'm going to show you how we clean these up and get rid of this horrible sheen and glazing which we've got on the front of the pad if you can recall when we cleaned up our toe ball we used brake disk cleaner and some wet and dry and that's exactly the same stuff I'm going to use here to clean this paddock with what we're going to do is we're going to use some 240 grit wet and dry and I'll break this cleaner and all we're going to do is we're going to get all the surfaces nice and wet I'll buy wet and dry and our ball there and we're just going to go in a circular motion we don't wanna press too hard we don't want to change the shape and you'll see that sooner or later the glazing will disappear it's important to keep it wet as well the brake disk cleaner will in fact evaporate over time as you can see it has done there it's also quite a filthy job which is why you can see me using prepared gloves and as you can see the sheen has already disappeared and that would be good for a few more trips out I would think so as soon as the wet and dry just dries off let's give it good I'll clean up and there we go that's a good pad and all we need to do is purchase some shims for the back of this one and the one on the other side as well and that'd be good and give us a good friction connection to our ball when we're towing well there you go guys that's it that's the job done fairly simple as you can see it took less than a minute to replace both pads both sides no problems at all the only tool you're actually going to need is a screwdriver if they're a bit stiff don't be tempted to start hitting them with hammers just use your hand and give a little bit of pressure etc and they will come out no problems at all ours just fell out straight onto the floor and actual fact when they do fall out onto the floor just put something on the floor beneath so that it catches the the pad so they don't smash or they don't break or chip or anything we're on hard standing here so I made sure I put a couple of cross underneath and it stopped them from from breaking or damaging when they came out now typical symptoms of you needing to replace your pads are creaking groaning or making any sort of strange sounds which sounds like it's coming from the caravan as you're towing the symptoms for us were quite straightforward we start off the journey with no sounds no groaning no sounds at all but then as the journey went on we started to notice more more groaning from the hitch area and indeed when we looked at the pads and we looked at the toe ball there was a lot of shining a lot of glazing going on which tends to suggest that they were not really doing the job that they were designed to do so cleaning them up would have probably cured all of that but to be honest with you I've got a spare set here so let's just replace them and show you how to do that now as I mentioned you can buy shims for your pads as well which just prolongs the life of them if they're not too badly worn just give them a clean put some shims in and it just pushes them a little bit further onto the ball so that's it that's all I've got to show you today hope it's been of use for you any questions feel free to put them down below and that's it from us this week so thanks again for watching guys and I'm going to go and have a cold drink is really very warm out here take care ceasing bye you

Channel: The Trudgians

Views: 171,529

Rating: 4.8388538 out of 5

Keywords: ALKO, AKS3004, Friction pads, caravan, stabliser

Id: Hxssz8ukUFs

Length: 7min 7sec (427 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 15 2016