My friend Rob goaded me into buying the trailer by promising to help me go pick it up. I happily took him up on the offer, as Rob has got lots of experience in picking these things up. I loaded every hand tool I could into the van, along with 2 twenty ton bottle jacks, 1 floor jack, 1 hi-lift jack, 5 good rims, 4 new tires and 1 not-so-new-but-still-looks-good tire, $130 worth of bearings, races, and seals, temporary electrical lights, and lots of Mountain Dew, SoBe energy drinks, a thermos full of coffee and five pounds of Slim Jims and picked Rob up at his house at 3:00am. We had made it to Cape Cod by 8:30am with the intention of changing to the new tires and replacing or at least repacking the bearings before the long tow home. However, on the ride out we had been talking to our friend Frank who gave us the advise of "Just hook on and tow, man". We took his advise. We blew up the tires, re-wired the connection from van to trailer and headed down the road.
We found out that we had trailer brakes as soon as I stepped on the brake pedal, which was odd since I did not have any brake controller on the van. We decided to drive with the brake lights activating the brakes on the trailer until we tried to puill away from the first stop sign. With the blinkers blinking for a left hand turn, I took my foot off the brake and our rig lurched in time with the flashing of the blinker. Yup, somehow out blinkers were wired into our trailer brakes! No problem, out came the wire cutters and we were on the road without brakes.
We made it home with no problems, except for once when one of the brakes on the trailer decided to lock up coming out of a toll plaza. Quick pull over and check, the problem went away and we drove the rest of the way home without incident. 720 miles, 18.25 miles per gallon, and 16 hours with my good buddy Robbie.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment