A stitch in time....

Saves nine, so they say. I'm usually pretty good about being proactive about my vehicles, but one that I've neglected for far too long is my trailer and yesterday it bit me in the butt.

I was helping a friend pick up a Volvo 940 about 2 hours from my house, I pull the trailer out of the back yard, and give it a very brief once over. Trailer lights are sorta working, one tire is way low on air and the others have some fairly obvious sidewall cracks due to age, but other than that things look good. So I air up the offending tire, re-ground the trailer wiring, while I try to ignore the obvious cracks and missing pieces of insulation on the wiring harness.

Get about an hour into our trip, when the tire that was low on air decides to give out on the highway, now this is a tire I bought a little over 6 months ago to replace one that got punctured. I don't have a spare, I would have had a spare if I had taken the time to replace the one that got punctured, but I've been way to busy to sit down and order a $40 wheel and tire off Amazon. Okay well I know Walmart carries the size I need, so we'll just take the wheel off and limp tot he next Walmart which is only a mile down the highway. The lugnuts and studs look pretty rusty, I guess the sprinklers next to it have been giving it a bath pretty regularly., might need to adjust those, but I digress. I got four of the nuts off, but the last one just spins, awesome... the stud is stripped out in the hub. But I already knew this, I found out when I changed the wheel six months ago, but I was too busy to fix it that day and it just fell by the wayside. The only reason I got it off last time was I had my torch and impact wrench handy, both of which were not with me this time. I'm an idiot.

Thanks to technology I find a Harbor Freight is luckily only a couple miles up the road. So we unhook the trailer, I'm a little leery of just leaving it there on the roadside, even with a flat tire, Florida isn't really known for it's law abiding citizens, but since I was too cheap and lazy to order a hitch lock, I guess I'll have to trust no one will see it where I have it parked. We take off, get to Harbor Freight, they have the cordless impact wrench in stock and the 7/8 socket I need. My wallet is now about $130 lighter. But my thought now is whether the battery in the impact has a charge, it's about lunch time now so we stop at a Jersey Mike's and find an empty outlet to plug the charger into and eat slowly.

After lunch we head back and stop at Walmart for a wheel/tire, $90 later I have my wheel, never mind that this same wheel and tires goes for about $40 on Amazon. Being unprepared is beginning to get costly. We finally make it back to the trailer, get the tire swapped out and are back on track to pick up this car.

Thankfully the rest of the trip was drama free and we made it back before the sun went down.

All told it cost me $210 and 2 hours of daylight to replace one trailer tire. So my frugality and laziness bit me right in the ass on this one. I could have bought four new tires and wheels on Amazon for that price. Lesson learned for me, don't put off trailer maintenance, yeah it's not as fun as working on your $2016 challenge car but it'll pay for itself in the end when you're not stuck on the side of the road in 90+ degree heat trying to remove a tire.

Getting my trailer ready is one of those things I continually do AFTER I get the car ready. I should probably rethink that.

Not to sound like a dick, but maybe while you're thinking about it, open a new tab and take car of the other tires.

I'm in no place to say anything. 20 years with my (dads) boat trailer, never had a spare tire on it. Just put new lights on every spring and greased the bearings. As far back as I can remember we never changed the tires, thinking about it. I'm surprised we never had a problem.

revrico wrote: Not to sound like a dick, but maybe while you're thinking about it, open a new tab and take car of the other tires. I'm in no place to say anything. 20 years with my (dads) boat trailer, never had a spare tire on it. Just put new lights on every spring and greased the bearings. As far back as I can remember we never changed the tires, thinking about it. I'm surprised we never had a problem.

Oh believe me I'm buying 5 new tires. Switching from 13's to 14's and getting a spare. I also never thought about the braking situation on the trailer, well the situation is it has none, well none connected. The front axle has electric drums, they just aren't hooked up to anything, so I'm planning to get another set for the rear axle and a brake controller for the truck.

The fix for terrible trailer maintenance is to get too big a diesel truck to tow it. You won't even know you have been throwing sparks from the bare rim until you stop for fuel. That is when all those shiny happy people waving and pointing as they went by will make sense.

Guess how I know this

In reply to Huckleberry:

I did this too.

SOP when I was a kid was to put the used tires from the daily drivers on appropriate rims for the trailer every time we got new tires. That kept them only a couple years older than the tow rig. Sadly, now I get new tires for the daily based on age more often than miles, and I just can't bring myself to run 17+" tires on the trailers.

With all of the work you have been doing to the house I don't know that I would call you lazy. Sometimes things take a back seat until they demand more attention.

I see a lot of trailers, from yard service to 35' boats on trailers. Almost none have spares. I learned that lesson a long time ago. Camper trailer on the side of I-70.

Welp $450 later I have all new tires, a brake controller and wiring, LED trailer lights set, and other incidentals, headed my way. I'll probably make a little trailer refresh build post once all my stuff comes in.

On a better note, thanks to generous return policies I was able to return all the items I had to purchase in haste on the trip. So I guess that's a silver lining.