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Trailer Brakes Issues

G

Geewest

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I'm having some issues with the brakes on my Trailer. Its a VM Trailer. The Brakes are mounted on the 2 forward wheels of the trailer. The rear wheels have no brakes. I have a pretty steep hill going down to my house. Is 1/2 mile long and its about a 10% grade. So I'm riding the brakes all the way down the hill. When I stop at my house my brakes are very hot and you can smell them. Some times you can see smoke. This weeknd we went on a road trip and I noticed that at the bottom of a long down hill road it looked as if my brakes got so hot that the grease melted out and flew all over the wheel it self. Now I notice My brakes are grinding pretty bad. I'm sure I need to turn the rotors and replace the wheel berrings ect. I was hoping some of you had some Insite on what's going on. My first guess was that they are set to tight and don't let go and im dragging the brakes.
 
you can see the grade of the hill in the back ground its steep but not that bad. I don't go flying down the hill and then just slams on the brakes I know that would over heat them so what Im saying is I drive knowing that I have brake issues and I drive down hill slow and try and modulate them brakes when I can. I know the weight of the trailer activates the brakes so I try and drive so the weight of the trailer is not slammed up against the truck ect
 
What type of brakes and brake system do you have? Surge or electric brakes and drum or disc brakes. Kind of odd to have brakes on the front axle only, never seen that most manufacturers of tandem axle trailers put the brakes on the rear axles.
 
My trailer has disk's on both front wheels. It uses surge brakes. The toung in the trailer houses the hydraulic master that works the brakes
 
I think it needs an adjustment of the surge activation.
 
You could also switch them to electric over hydraulic and then you could control them with a electric brake control. I just did a similar change over on a trailer for a triple axle trailer for a 35 ft mainship that only had surge disc brakes on the front axle, now it has electric over hydraulic disc on all three axles. I could post some pics if you would like.
 
I would like to see some pic's of the electric brake conversion.

What are the benifits of the electric brake conversion?
 
Electric brakes with the controller works off of brake pedal pressure.
 
I've had surge brakes on both of the boats I have owned. I had problems like you on the first boat where the pads were too tight to the disc causing too much friction and then heat. A simple adjustment from our mechanic solved the problem. We did have a problem where my bearings got too hot on a trip once where almost all of the grease leaked out. I had them removed, cleaned, replaced, and greased..............
 
Electric brakes. The electric controllers that I use are proportional controllers once the brake pedal is stepped on, it activates a motion sensing device (accelerometer) that knows how fast the tow vehicle is stopping. It then applies power to the trailer brakes equally as fast (or slow) as the towing vehicle. This allows the trailer to stop at the same rate as the tow vehicle. This can also be adjusted or controlled to your liking. I personally use Teckonsha Prodigy P2 You can get more info if you read up on them.

​What this conversion did for us was allows us to do is have total control over the braking of this trailer, how little or how much just by adjusting the brake controller inside the vehicle.

You would not need all of this. This is just showing what I did with this trailer. if you wanted you could still use your single axle brakes with a pump like this to control the brake instead of your surge brake coupler, and a brake away kit.

Parts list of what I purchased for this job.

1.Electric over hydraulic brake pump

2.Two sets of 12" disk brake kits for 6000lbs axles. This trailer has three 6000 lbs axles, the front axle was already equipped with 12" disks

3.Three axle brake line kit

4.Emergency brake away battery kit.

5.New RV plug and Misc. wire

First Picture

1. is the electric over hydraulic pump

2. batteries for the emergency brake brake away switch

3. surge brake coupling that has been disconnected and welded solid, this can also be removed and replaced with a standard coupling.

4. Forgot to draw the line to it, the pump has to be wired to a new 7way rv plug seen in the front.



Picture of the electric over hydraulic pump and the emergency brake batteries



Brake lines that were added





Current brake disks that were installed and new one on axle behind it.

 
It's best not to ride the brakes all the way down a long hill but rather to brake then release, brake then release to allow them to cool. Also it helps to put tow vehicle in a lower gear. In my experience hauling oversize and overweight loads, you never want to ride the brakes for a long period of time as they heat up.
 
There are several different surge brake companies, some have sensitivity adjusters near the head some do not, i would look at the owners manual and see if it has a section for the brakes. That is a down fall of surge brakes when running down hill with a heavy trailer pushing you. Going with electric over hydraulic is an option but a lot of extra head ache, doing a total swap to full electric would be the best.
 
Bigtop said:
It's best not to ride the brakes all the way down a long hill but rather to brake then release, brake then release to allow them to cool. Also it helps to put tow vehicle in a lower gear. In my experience hauling oversize and overweight loads, you never want to ride the brakes for a long period of time as they heat up.
Click to expand...
He has surge brakes, you are thinking he has electric brakes, with surge brakes the action of braking with the vehicle causes the weight of the trailer to push against the tow vehicle and the grade and weight of the trailer pushing against the vehicle are what apply the brakes so you really have no control and he is even worse off having disc brakes because he can not back off the adjustment like one could with drum brakes.
 
Also use a lower gear so your tow vehicles engine provides braking too.
 
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