How to Maintain a Trailer's Coupler

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Albert Hedgepeth with Expert Village. Today we're going to talk a little bit about trailer maintenance. What we're going to talk about now is how to deal with a coupler and how to maintain it. There's some really basic components to a coupler that you really need to look at and inspect visually and actually get your hands on it and make sure they're in working order before you start driving down the highway at 60 miles an hour. The chains, the safety chains are a huge thing that you need to make sure. This coupling device unlocks and it pops off the back of your bumper hitch, you need to be able to keep the trailer behind you. That's what these safety chains do. Inspecting them is pretty easy. As you can see, this one's much more rusted than this one. So this chain might need to be replaced very soon. You need to make sure that your hooks are actually still bent and they haven't gotten manipulated so that they will still hold on to the back of the truck. Looking at these bolts visually, making sure that they aren't rusted and that they aren't broken is also just a great way to increase the safety of the trailer itself. Next thing you want to look at is the actual locking device itself. You want to make sure that it moves pretty freely. One of the things that you need to be really sure about is making sure that that it actually fits on the ball of the trailer snugly. You don't want it to fit too tight, but you don't want it to be too loose. There's an adjustment screw on the bottom of it that you can do that with. You want to make sure that your cotter pin is in good working order and that you got a good one that's connected to the trailer. That?s the locking device that will actually lock the handle in place onto the ball. The next thing you're going to want to do is you might want to look and make sure that you have good brake fluid, especially at the beginning of the year. You want to go ahead and pull this out. It has a little dipstick on it and then you want to double check it to make sure that its got fluid, if not, go ahead and add some DOT3 brake fluid and you should be on your way. The next thing you're going to want to check out is this. This is a really important component to being safe on the highway. If your coupler breaks and the safety chains don't work, this is going to lock the trailer. What happens is this is connected to the same part of the hitch on the truck as the safety chains and if the truck were to continue going, it would yank this cable out and at that point, the brakes on the trailer will look and it should stop without running off and running into things."