RV Wheel Maintenance, What You Need To Know.

[Music] how's it going I'm Jarrod Gillis welcome to another all about RVs today we're gonna be looking at barring maintenance basically maintenance for your will how to repack those bearings what you need to do and how to inspect the brakes and how to adjust them so that you can go down the road safely and to be able to stop properly so this should help walk you through the process because this is something that you should do every 12,000 miles or once a year for the towable rvs the travel trailers and the fifth wheel so this can not only save you money if you do this yourself it can also save you time not having to go to the RV dealership and wait on their their service so this is something if you don't mind getting your hands dirty can save you a lot of time and money so let's start off by removing the wheel after we have jacked it up and safely supported it we remove the wheel and then we can just pop that outer hub off and then we can remove the cotter pin and then that will allow us to take the castle nut off which is what holds in the washer and the outer bearing and then the drum can come off too [Music] this is where we can see how dirty of a job it's going to be we can start cleaning off the grease from the spindle that we want to get rid of all the old grease and check to see if there is any damage on the spindle itself at this point we can take a look at the brakes give them a quick inspection to see if anything needs to be replaced so the magnet there in the middle has four dots those dots are actually the wear indicator for that magnet if they're worn down to where you can't really see those dots or they're starting to disappear that magnet needs to be replaced and oftentimes rather than just replacing the magnet a lot of people just replace the entire assembly like we're going to be doing today we're gonna be installing the automatic adjusting brakes because ours are such a pain to be able to adjust because of the way that our axle is set up you can see the offset on our axle and because of that it makes it really hard to get to that port on how to adjust them in the back I'll show you that in a little bit but while we're inspecting things we can take a look at that brake pad so that brake pad usually starts off around 3/16 so it's not super thick but when you've worn that down to a sixteenth of an inch 1/16 of an inch it's time to replace it so if it's worn down that low it's time to replace your brakes since we're changing out our brakes to automatic adjusting brakes we just have five bolts to pull off these 12-inch electric brakes once we've removed the hardware we can pull the assembly off cut the wires and set the old brake aside now we're gonna simply bolt on the new assembly and tighten down the hardware like you would a will alternating in a star pattern now let me give you a quick rundown how electric brakes work so that way as you're adjusting them you have a good idea of what you're adjusting so when you press the brake pedal it activates the magnet which sticks to the drum and as the drum is spinning it swings the arm that the magnet is attached to which pushes the brake pad against the outside of the drum and that's how it slows everything down so for your typical maintenance of the brakes if you're not replacing the entire assembly like we're doing here you want to adjust it so that the magnets checking out good there break pad on there to last you another year you want to adjust it so that break pad as soon as you press on the brakes its contacting the outside of that drum so there's a little port on the back of the brake assembly that you can pop off and then there's going to be a way that you can stick in a brake spoon and be able to adjust that that little device in there to move those brake pads out so that it contacts at the earliest possible time when you press on the brakes you don't necessarily need a brake spoon you can use a screw driver it might be easier for me to show you since we have the brakes taken apart and I can show you from the outside from the drum side what you would be adjusting if you're doing it from that back port you need to be able to have the wheel on to see how it's spinning to be able to do it and that's why you need to use that back port ours was a pain because if you see the way our axle is in there I even made a custom spoon brake spoon to be able to do this but it was still so difficult to try and get in there and adjust it properly these auto adjusting brakes is just gonna make it to where I don't have to worry about maintaining that and having to worry about that adjustment now to adjust your brakes you want to have the will be able to freely spin and you're going to spin that adjustment from the back and as you do that it's going to become really difficult to be able to spin that wheel anymore once you have it at that point you want to back your adjustment off so that you can start spinning that wheel again once you have it at that position you want to leave it because that's the earliest time that your brake pad is gonna be able to contact that drum when you press your brake pedal so having them properly adjusted will give you the best braking possible for that system and your RV you don't want to have too much room till that brake pad contacts the drum and you don't want it dragging creating a lot of heat and resistance as you're going down the road but with the new brakes that we're putting in there the auto adjusting ones every time you break when you're going forward it auto adjust so you don't have to do this all the time now we can finish installing the brake switch we need to connect the wires there's no polarity on the wires so it doesn't matter that's why they're not color coded we're gonna connect both of these wires together with these butt splice connectors and they are a heat shrink type of connector so we can heat those up with the heat gun and they give you a nice weather tight seal on the wires now that's it for our brake maintenance and our brake assembly let's move back over to the bearings I want to give you a quick visual though of what we're doing and what we're installing inside of this drum so you can see that we're gonna install a new seal that's going to hold the grease inside of that drum where we need it we have our inner bearing that's going to go on there we have our outer bearing and you can see how the drum is going to spin freely on these bearings but we'll start with popping the seal off the back of the drum I'm gonna put a link down in the description to all the tools and components and brakes that we've used in this video so if you're looking for anything it'll be down in the description this is when we clean everything off we want to get rid of all the old grease wiping it up getting it all off of there and then we can use brake cleaner to get rid of the last of the residue that's on there so that it's not messing with the magnet or the brake pads once we have everything clean and all the grease is gone we can start repacking the bearings I have this little bearing packer that I thought it was great it did a fantastic job getting all that grease inside of the bearings you want to packed inside of it it's pretty simple to use you can shoot the grease right in the bottom and then you drop your bearing in the top and then you force the grease through it and it goes through all the inner workings of the bearing you want to pack both bearings and then add a thin layer of grease to the spindle now I forgot to mention before you pack everything with grease you wanna you want to check out your equipment you want to look at your bearings after you've gotten them all cleaned up and you want to look for any pitting or any kind of discoloration to see if you need to replace those also on the spindle you want to see if there's any problems with that any discoloration pitting and also inside of the hub you have a couple of races basically the metal that this is gonna sit in those can be replaced too if there's any discoloration or or pitting so you want to visually inspect those to make sure you're not putting in something that you might have a problem with but you want to fully pack these with grease now if you don't have a bearing packer you can actually use your hand a lot of people prefer to do it that way so you put a lot of grease on your hand and then you just work it into the inner workings of your bearing you don't want to just topically apply the grease you want it on the inside of the bearing and get some on outside - this the sink just needs to be packed and greased to operate properly so once we put a little bit of grease on the inside of that drum we can drop our inner bearing in there just before we put our seal on now that we have that assembled we can install the drum and I like to add a little bit of grease in case the bearings need to - pull it in then we can put in the outer bearing you don't want to overdo it but you want plenty of grease in here then we put in the washer and then the castle nut you should torque down the castle nut to 50 pounds and spin the drum so that you seat the bearings in there then you want to back off that castle nut so it can spin freely and then you put in that cotter pin so the castle nut can't come off then the last thing we have to do is to put our caps on so that can keep the grease in there not allow any of that grime from the road and dust and dirt to get in there and mess with our bearings they do make a tool to be able to put these on but I didn't have a tool so I just took one of the old caps and I just cut it so it can just go over this and I can just Hammer this and be able to put on the the cap without denting it so it worked out really well and was really easy so that in a nutshell is pretty much the maintenance you need to do for your towable RV for your travel trailers and your fifth wheels you can see why some people like going to the oil bath because you remove the necessity to do this every 12,000 miles or once a year you just check the oil in the oil bath rather than having to do this maintenance all the time so you can just check your brakes if you have the automatically adjusting brakes then it brings your maintenance down significantly let's be honest less maintenance is more time getting out there to go RVing and more time to do the things that you love so I'm considering going with in an oil bath in the future but for now our maintenance is done for the year so I don't really have to worry about it so I think that's gonna do it for today if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to see more videos about our being hit that subscribe button and if we don't see you on the road hopefully we will see you next video [Music] [Applause]

Channel: All About RV's

Views: 125,216

Keywords: RV, RVing, RV life, RVers, Jared Gillis, Less house more living, How To RV, DIY RV, Learn to RV, Motorhome, Class A, 5th wheel, RV Electrical, RV Repair, RV America, All About RVs, Learn To RV, RV Knowledge, RV Maintenance, RV Money saving tips, RV DIY, RV Bearings, RV Brakes, RV Brake adjustment, RV yearly maintenance

Id: VQsIdi7dQ6o

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020