How to Maintain Trailer Brakes

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Albert Hedgepeth with Expert Village. Today we're going to talk a little bit about trailer maintenance. Understanding the braking that your trailer has and understanding how the components work and how they hookup to the truck is essential to being safe while you're on the highway. A lot of trailers these days are actually coming with self-activating brakes. These brakes what they do, is literally whenever the tongue drops or the car brakes, it engages a braking system that?s on the back of the truck. This helps to make sure that the car or truck is not doing all the braking itself. These five pin connectors are in of a new standard. One of the pins actually sends a signal to the coupling while you're in reverse so that the braking mechanism is disengaged. And what that does is it allows you to actually backup without the brakes locking on their own. Since whenever you put the car in reverse, the tongue drops anyway and that is what normally engages the brake. Another way if you don't have this five pin connector to actually hook right into your electrical system, is most of them have a cotter pin. You go ahead and yank the cotter pin out and you put it into the stop hole. What this does is it allows the trailer to be backed up without the actuator actually initiating. So in other words, it disengages the brake function whenever you're backing up. This can be really helpful whenever launching your boat or just backing it into your slip for storage. You should really do a basic visual inspection of your brakes before you take off and go anyway. You should look at them, make sure that they spin freely, some brake cleaner is always a good idea to hit them with, especially the beginning of seasons or before long trips. And you just want to kind of visually inspect the hoses that are going to the brakes to make sure no brake fluid is leaking and that the calipers aren't locked. Most of the times if you do that, you'll have no problems stopping."