Adding Trailer Brakes

[mbrule]

Yes, In my opinion, VERY large sadvantage to electric, manual control to prevent sway or in emergency situations! I have towed with both types and currently have two trailers with electrics. I like the ability to customize braking power and application time, on both the car trailer with its varying loads and the camper for terrain / speed differences.

Bottom line, again IMO, unless your trailer is very light relative to your tow vehicle, brakes on the trailer are necessary for a safe tow experience. I once spun a rented trailer out and banged up my truck because I had been too lazy to make an adapter so the brake control would work! Trailer started to sway going down a hill and I couldn't stop it.

Matt

 

[RanchMan]

<font color=blue>Trailer started to sway going down a hill </font color=blue>

Yea, oscillation can be a pretty un-fun thing! I put <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.drawtite-hitches.com/WD/sway_control.htm>one of these </A>on my trailer to address sway. WOW! /w3tcompact/icons/shocked.gif Watta difference! I think it was probably the best $90 "do-dad" I bought for the trailer.

 

[mopacman]

I have a trailer with two 6000lb axles with hydraulic brakes.It has an AUSCO trailer braker unit that is controlled from an electric brake controller. This unit is an electric motor driven hydraulic pump. It works very well, it is easy to adjust from the controller. This controller also works with electric brakes.

 

[Scott_in_WVA]

Ozark................
Whats your opinion?

 

[Ozarker]

I use and prefer surge brakes. The inconveniences are minor compared to the ease of use and ability to switch from one tow vehicle to another and still have trailer brakes. I'm pretty generous about letting friends use my trailer.

How often does anyone actually back up a hill or over a curb? Rarely for most people.....but a consideration for some.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

I use and prefer electric brakes. In fact if anyone's interested in converting their electric brakes to surge and they have seven to eight thousand pound Dexter Axles I'll give them the backing plates to do so. These are new unused surge brake backing plates with new shoes and wheel cylinders.

Through luck and fortune along with some this and that I ended up with a total of four HMVEE trailers and six axles for same. I made some money and had some fun. These were great trailers. The ones I used personally immediately went electric. Those I sold did the same at the request of the buyers.

They're at the shop and they're yours just for picking them up.

One of the reasons I like electric so much is the flexibility they offer me. My main trailer has two eight thousand pound Dexter Axles. When it's empty or lightly loaded I scale down the activator to nil to almost nil. But when I have the tractor, mixer, buckets, forks, and job materials on the trailer I scale the activator up to where the trailer brakes are carrying the load of the trailer.

My small trailer, a single axle six thousand pound Escot tilt, I bought with surge brakes, fifteen inch nylon eight ply tires, and a wood floor. The brake assemblies and the wood floor went into the trash day one. It has new Dexter electric brakes, a trick two and five sixteenths coupler that you back into, and sixteen inch wheels with ten ply radials. Again, the electric brakes allow me to adjust the effort of the trailer brakes according to my load.

If I've got a small job locally that only requires one attachment sometimes I'll use the small trailer. It's GVW is six thousand. The tractor weighs fifty four hundred. On a single axle I like having the ability to dial up plenty of brakes just in case.

Very few people borrow my trailers. Those that do have to have pintle couplers to borrow the big one and two and five sixteenths inserts to borrow the small one. Folks so equipped always have brake controllers. I can't explain it, well I could, but having heavy duty equipment eliminates most of the borrowing by amateurs.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Here is yet another twist to the trailer brake thing: I had a chance to buy a big single axle trailer with a gooseneck hitch that was made from the rear axle of a truck it had almost new 8.25 X 20 rubber and was a nice setup EXCEPT it had no brakes. The axle had nice hydraulic brakes and even had dual brake cylinders inside the backing plates. Here is what I did......We dumped out the differential and took out the side gears that the axles plug into. one gear we put in a safe place; the other one we welded to an adapter so that it would bolt to a small electric brake hub and drum. We mounted the hub and drum in the banjo housing and put it on a swivel. We drove the hub with the left hand axle using the adapter built from the differential side gear. Then we made a kidney shaped cam that welded to the backing plat such that when the hub put torque on the backing plate, it rotated the cam out and the cam contacted a tomahawk -shaped cam follower which pivoted from above and which had a rod that operated a Chevrolet truck master cylinder and sets the brakes. A tiny amount of current actuates the electric brake which then tries to rotate the backing plate which brings the cam out which touches the cam follower which then operates the brake master cylinder. It works perfect and even has brakeaway protection. it works in fwd and in reverse of course. We took this trailer over the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada mtns last year with lots of weight on it. We grossed over 20K with my 3/4T GM pickup pulling it. I have used LOTS of different trailer brake setups from vacuum to electric to air, and I have to say that the one we invented was real smooth and very controllable, and we had no worry about the magnets building up too much heat.

 

[Kodiak]

Heres a easier version for the same truck axle. If you had left the guts in the differential you could have attached a brake disk to the yoke and braked the disk with an electric actuated caliper. One brake for both wheels and could be utilized as a emergency brake also.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

That was just one of about twenty different designs that I dreamed up and rejected as possibly ending up as too expensive, too little braking area, too vulnerable to heat build up, and which could allow the gears in that big truck axle to suck up horsepower. Since this had to be a setup which could successfully challenge the fearsome heights of Donner Pass and the Rockies after that, heat buildup was a huge consideration. I thought and thought about what to do, and had oodles of ideas that ranged from chain driving an electric hub to you-name-it. I knew that if I couldn't think up something good that I could always shell out 2500 bucks for the brainy electric/hydraulic servo system that is available. What I ended up with was the least cost and fewest pieces with only two items that had to be taken to a machine shop. .To make matters even more complicated, I was building this AFTER we sold our place, and AFTER I no longer had a shop to work in so it was a driveway-fabbed project at a house were were renting for just eleven months before shagging to the Midwest. A very pressurizing and very challenging project to say the least. There would be no opportunity to test it either, the trip WAS the test. SHEESH!....Dave

 

[Kodiak]

Well I definitely wasn't taking Donner Pass into consideration. On second reflections, maybe a drogue chute off of a fighter plane might have been a good addition.