hey everyone in today's video I want to show you a couple of different ways of how to jack up your
travel trailer and I also want to talk about a couple of mistakes I made when it came to tires
so we're going to talk about jacking up a trailer and higher replacement in the rain yeah Alaska the
first method I'm going to use is a bottle jack this is a four ton bottle jack so this will hold
eight thousand pounds this is nowhere near it but I do have a couple of safety things that I do want
to start off with one of them is I want to have my spare so basically what i'm going to do today
is we're going to replace both of these we're going to place all the tires so I
have to take two off at a time take them to the tire shop to have the new tires put on and then
come back uh what I'm going to do though is put the spare on one side so in order to do that
I have taken my 13/16 socket and I've already loosened these
so that's how you take off your spare
now because I'm going to use a bottle jack I want to put it up on some boards
well the bottle jacks have this sort of ridged edge I'm always afraid it's going to slip off
of the frame and so I've taken another board and I've just kind of boarded out a little bit
so the bottle jack will fit right in there and it won't slip off
now the place you do not want to put the jack is on the axles there is a place on some of
them that have a bracket that you can use but for this particular one I'm not going to I'm
going to stick this right in the middle here and then I'm going to stick this right on top of it
but before I do that i'm going to loosen up the lug nuts on both of these tires
the most ideal situation is if you're doing this hooked up to your vehicle to give you some extra
stability we only have one vehicle so we don't have that luxury what I have done is I've put
four chalks I've got two chalks on each tire and then hopefully that'll give it the most
stability that we could possibly have for this all right so I'm gonna stick this up on top here
and I'm gonna go ahead and jack this up
I'm actually going to use my breaker bar it's a much better handle and won't come
apart and of course you can use power tools for this but
that would require us to use a generator I'm actually going to go ahead and put the spare on
this one I'm never really comfortable having both tires off just in case that something happens to
the jack in theory the uh just having one tire on here will hold the trailer up no problem
so this is a good safety device to do
this
hey I got my new tires and I'm gonna go ahead and put this one back on oh one of the things is
see this right here that's a balancing tab most RVs do not have do not come with tires
that are balanced so it is a good idea to take them off and go get them balanced
all right so I've jacked the bottle jack up a little bit again don't forget to put these back in
I almost did all right now I can line this up stick the tire back on
and we'll put the lug nuts back on do that for both sides and then uh I'll go from there
so I'm just gonna loosely tighten these right now I can't torque them yet okay
all right I'm gonna take the spare off we'll put the other one on
all right now so we've got our wheels back on successfully I still have to torque those but
I'm going to go ahead and and hit the relief valve here on the bottle jack and bring it down
okay now the most important part of this is to torque them these are torqued to 90 foot pounds
so you hear that click and do your star
pattern
and then I go around one more time too
and then I'm going to torque this one
when you're done with your torque wrench make sure you uh back it all the way
down to zero so this is uh spring-loaded and you don't want to wear that out so let's go
do the other side we're going to do a whole different method as far as jacking this up
method number two they're going to try for the very first time I'm going to try
our truck jack this is just a scissor jack and it should this has kind of got a nice top on it
and it should fit kind of perfectly with the frame here all right so I'm going to stick this in here
and before I forget I'm gonna go ahead and loosen the lug nuts
all right and here we go
okay don't forget to take your TPMS (Tire Pressure Monitor System) off
so the tire shop doesn't lose them
all right I finished with these two tires so I've got them back on I've got the jack just
down enough or I've already torqued them and we'll lower this jack and then I'll give you
my opinion of which of these methods I like the best between the bottle jack and the truck jack
but wait there's one more way we can do this and
this is the method you'll most likely want to use if you're hooked up to your vehicle
and you're going down the road and you have a flat tire and what we like to use
is this trailer aid so basically what you're going to do is put this into place
so let's say it's your back tire that needs to be changed you're going to drive your front tire
up onto the ramp your first before you do that you're going to go ahead and have your spare
ready to go and i'm going to loosen up the lug nuts on the tire that needs to be changed and then
we're going to drive up on the ramp we're going to take the wheel off put the new one back on
and tighten down the lug nuts as much as you can drive back off and then tighten them with the
work wrench all right what's my final opinion well these all actually worked pretty well
the bottle jack worked great but I don't know if you could see in the camera I had a little divot
that I had drilled in here and uh so it was pretty soft with that much and it really kind of dug in
quite a bit more so probably lucky that it didn't go all the way through but hey it worked just
fine at the time so you might want to use some really heavy piece of rubber or something like
that if you needed to to protect the the frame from these ridges on here but it did work great
uh I really like using the scissor jack from the truck and if I have to do two tires again
in the future this is probably what I'll use we have it handy in the truck so it's pretty easy
and the trailer aid is perfect if you have a flat while on the road or if you're hooked up to your
tow vehicle and even if you have to change both tires a little bit more work with backing on and
off the ramp but this is definitely the go-to if you have a single tire that you need to change
well just remember when jacking up your RV to use the manufacturer's recommendation on where
and of course use your best judgment and be safe doing it so let's talk about the two mistakes that
I made when it came to tires so last year we had a bent axle and the axle was replaced and
one of the tires was was really worn that's how we discovered we had a bent axle I looked at the
other tires or I thought I looked at the other tires and they looked pretty new still so I just
had them replace the one well that's not really a great idea but you know who wants to spend lots of
money on tires it's just not a sexy purchase so we just had the the one replaced and then
this year now granted was only 100 miles we got the axle and the tire replaced then we came home
that's 100 miles away we haven't been anywhere else with the RV uh this year when I was looking
over the tires before our next trip I'm like huh the tire behind it's kind of warm and I didn't
really realize that on the inside tread here so I'm like darn it I guess i should have just
replaced all four and that is really what you should do is just replace all four of them
at a time so that was mistake number one take number two is they replace the tire and I'm like
oh cool man they got the exact same tire and they look exactly like the same tire on the outside
a year later as I'm looking everything over a little bit more closely I discover that
they're not the exact same tire here's one of the things you want to look for on your tires
when you do have them replaced the tires that come with the escape are load d tires the one that they
replaced it with is a load C so that's another thing you don't want to do you don't want to run
different load tires ratings on your on your trailer you just need to run all four
load C or all four load D so let's talk about some tire things first of all these are ST tires
which means special trailer they are have stiffer sidewalls and they're more flexible for cornering
and uh backing so that's great there are some discussions sometimes on whether you should use LT
tires those are for trucks and I'm going to put a link to a video below that Fate Unbounded David
did a great job of explaining why you should not run LT tires and you should continue going with ST
tires well if you're considering putting different tires on your RV or trailer make sure you know
what the load rating needs to be so escape put low d tires that's actually great because really for
the weight of these you only need low seed so you do need to know what the weight of your trailer
is we've had ours weighed so we know what it is but if you don't you can come find the sticker
on our escape is right here so that gives us what the gvwrl
is
and then to get the load rating you will need to divide if you have a single axle by two of that
weight and a double axle divide by four so we're roughly you know we're gonna go for the full await
uh being full-timers we're pretty close to that uh we'll need to run have tires that'll at least
handle 1250 pounds but you want to have a built-in safety of at least 20 percent the load seas do
that but the low d tires do that even better the thing you also want to look at is the date
on these so you don't want to get tires that are really super old and that's going to be this four
digit number right here this one says 2520. so these were manufactured in the 25th week of 2020.
all right when you get new tires have them professionally mounted and balanced now most
manufacturers put the cheapest tires on and they don't actually have them balanced and it's kind
of a big deal I honestly didn't look at the tires when it took them in to see if they were balanced
but I did see that the spare was so another good thumbs up that the tires appear to have been
balanced now every tire manufacturer has higher inflation charts and that'll also tell you what
the max speed is one of the issues with tires and we've all heard about tires being manufactured in
other countries they have a bad wrap yes sometimes they're not made as well but one of the biggest
issues is that people are going too fast over the rating for that tire and too much of a load so
really pay attention to that the tires that escape puts on rainiers are rated to 81 miles an hour
I am never going to go that fast in my RV uh but most tires are only rated for 65 miles an hour and
if you're like me you've seen people whizzing right past way past that speed all right let's
talk tire inflation if you ask 10 different people what your tires should be inflated to
you probably will get 10 different answers what is up with that well a few things when you have tires
there every manufacturer has a tire inflation chart now that is based on the weight of the load
on the tire and that's what you should inflate the tires to the goodyear we switched to goodyear
endurance tires goodyear even says that they recommend that you go with the manufacturer's
recommendation on that because the manufacturer comes up with the correct psi based on weight and
a whole bunch of other factors like safety and comfort in the the ride now you'll see a lot of
these it says max psi to 65 to me I wouldn't want to run 65 in our tires just because that's going
to be really hard and your trailer is going to be bouncing around and you might have stuff moving
around in there a little bit more because it's going to be a definitely a stiffer ride on that
for our trailers it says four max load 65 psi we are not running anywhere near max load
on that because that's several hundred pounds more on each tire so you have to use your best
judgment go to the manufacturers inflation chart and go by the manufacturer of your RV or trailer
on what they recommend and you might need to play around a little bit with the
the inflation that you're going to be the most comfortable with for us the load D that was on
there escape recommended 50 psi that's the same rating as the new tires we put on as far as weight
and the load and so we're probably going to go 50 on that to 50 to 55 on those new tires so
I'd love to hear from all of you if you have any higher questions put those in the comments below
and if you get some value out of this video please hit the thumbs up that subscribe button
and we'll see you in our next video so Angie's told you all of the information that she
knows about tires and here's what I know tires they're great for swings and other games (haha)