How to : Jack up a caravan safely

at some point in caravan ownership you're going to need to Jack your caravan up either to perform some maintenance on your wheels or your hubs or if you have a flat tire and you're stuck on the side of the road at some point you're going to need to Jack the van up now on line and on YouTube there's lots of videos on different jacking systems that you can purchase adopt and adapt your van if like mine however you haven't got any of those jacking points where do you Jack the caravan and moreover how do you Jack the caravan in a safe controlled manner well Tom and I are up here today at the storage site and we're going to show you how to jack a caravan up we're going to assume that you need to change a wheel we don't actually need to but we're going to go through the motions anyway and we're going to show you how to do it now the first thing we need to do is we need to raise all the steadies up on the caravan the studies are not jacking points they're not connected to your chassis they're not connected to anything they're probably just connected to the floor so what we need to do first of all is we need to raise all the steadies off the floor the second thing we need to make sure is that the car is connected to the caravan when we Jack a caravan up with the brakes on we're going to effectively lift one side of the caravan and that means that the only thing touching the floor with a brake on it is the wheel the other side of the caravan now where we start to Jack the caravan is going to want to swing so by connecting the car with the brakes on and if you have an automatic make sure it's in park and the brakes are on whether the car connected the carand is not going to move it's not going to swing around the third thing we need to do is we need to chalk the wheel the other side of the caravan as well so basically the wheel that we're not going to jack up we need to go and chalk about so let's go into all of those things now okay so now we've got all of those things done final sanity check we need to make sure that nobody's in the van of course nothing's going to topple over and fall over and we start to lift and so we're just going to make a quick sanity check and make sure that we've done all of those safety things so the wheel is chocked the handbrake is on in the caravan we're connected to the car the handbrake is on in the car and we're also in park make sure that is the case if you have an automatic and all the steadies are up so let me just take a moment here to talk about the jacks which you can use this is one from the car this is a scissor jack it's used for the car and it may not be suitable for use on the caravan the thing to do is to check what the weight allowance is on this Jack this one here is rated for 1200 kilograms which means that this would be okay for our Caravan our caravan is 1485 mt PLM and we're only going to lift half the caravan so fourteen eighty five divided by two is well under the 1200 rating of this scissor jack I would recommend we don't use this though because this is designed for the car it's going to slip because there's nowhere for it to grip as you can see it's just a smooth surface it's also notoriously unstable and I would recommend that we just don't use this at all when jacking the caravan the other option is you have a bottle jack and this is a hydraulic bottle jack this one could lift four tonnes of weight again so what you were doing is you literally just pump away and as you can see the little piston comes at the top which is fantastic and you just keep something like this and it will just lift all day long and then when you're finished and you want to round it down you use the valve here open the valve and press down with your thumb that's it so this is the one we're going to use today make sure I seal that up for you Tom we're going to use this one today so let's get into the van and put it in place and the caravan so this is the world that we're going to lift and if we look at anything on itself you can see that we've got two holes one here and one here and you can buy from Alco and other manufacturers an add-on kit which allows you and gives you a jacking point now I haven't got that installed on this Caravan it's something I probably will do at a later date but that gives you a jacking point what you do not want to do under no circumstances do you want to jack up on this chassis realm there are only two places that we can jack up with and that is right behind the wheel and I'm going to maneuver the camera and show you exactly where we can jack up so there's two places we can jack up against it behind the wheel we can jack up at the very end of the axle tube right there and the other place we can jack up the is there's a bracket which just calls underneath the chassis rail yeah that looks good is that it yeah okay that's better job yeah okay and there we go that's him off the floor now it's obviously not miles up in the air but it's enough for us to get that wheel off okay so it's a couple important things to note when jacking up now Tom found it quite difficult getting the hydraulic pump up because the motor mover was in the way so we didn't have enough leverage to get the actual pump up the second thing to note as well is that it's not an easy job to do is quite difficult you find it quite hard because you couldn't actually see what you were doing so it's all by fill so that's how you would Jack the caravan if we were changing the wheel what we would have done to start with is loosen the wheel nuts on the wheel first then when it was off the floor taking the wheel nuts off chain to the tire etc things to make sure when you put the tire back on make sure you talk it up to the correct settings on your Caravan we would need to talk that up now as well do you think it'd be better if we had the jacking point installed yes so do you think there's something we should go in and purchase yes I think you're right it shows you that it can be done without the add-on kit it's not an easy job to do it would be infinitely easier if we had the jacking kit supplied by Alko if you're a little bit unsure I would say don't do it at all get a professional or somebody who's done it many times before in to do it for you because there's a lot of considerations here and at the end of day you're dealing with the safety of your Caravan and the safety of yourself so so there we go so I hope that's been informative for you any questions let us know below I think we'll go another cup of tea man will you reckon your plan good plan we'll catch you in the next one guys see you soon bye

Channel: The Trudgians

Views: 163,583

Rating: 4.4620252 out of 5

Keywords: caravan, jacking, wheel, tyre, safety, camping, towing

Id: veW3Oo8ghhg

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2016