RV Driving Tips: Regularly Check Your Brakes and Tires
RV Lifestyle & Repair EditorsDescription
While driving, the tires, hubs and brakes of an RV can heat up. If these items get too hot, it can be a sign something is not right with your RV unit or the brake system. Experienced RV owners know one of the best RV driving tips someone can offer is to regularly stop, get out and check the temperatures of the tires, hubs and brakes. This, like other RV driving tips should be conducted on both motorhomes and trailers.
A good rule of thumb is to check the tires, hubs and brakes every time you stop for gas. To check the temperatures of these items use an infrared thermometer that can be purchased from any auto part or home improvement store.
Those offering you RV driving tips may also suggest using an IR sonic measurer like the one by Ryobi, which can be found at just about any home improvement store. You can set this tool to measure temperatures at Centigrade and Fahrenheit. This unit can also measure distance, which will help to check for clearance when pulling into a space and determine how far back the campsite goes. It also comes in handy for checking to see if there is enough room to extend side rooms out.
This RV driving tips video will demonstrate how to use the temperature gauge, what specific components to measure, and what the different temperature readings are telling you. The best time to take these readings is during the middle of the day when the sun is evenly beating on both sides of the unit. This will give you a more accurate reading of the temperature from wear and friction of the tires, bearings, and brakes rolling down the road rather than hot sun beating down on one side of the RV. Take these RV driving tips into consideration during your next trip.
Whether you're driving a motorhome or pulling a trailer, it's important that you periodically check your brakes, your hubs and your tires whenever you stop for fuel. Now, you can use an infrared thermometer like this one here, you can get these at any automotive parts stores, most of your home improvement stores. And it's just a simple infrared that I'm gonna push down here, get a meter reading on it. And what I wanna do is, every time I stop for fuel, I wanna make sure I get out and check the hub, check the actual bearing, the brake drum for heat, check the tires as well. Just kinda get a sense of where they're running at and do it in the middle of the day. I don't wanna do it in the morning because I'll have sun on one side of the vehicle or late afternoon. That'll kinda give me a false reading but, you know, check it if you got an 80 degree ambient temperature and I'm running up in the 90s, maybe close to 100. That probably okay. The other thing I wanna make sure is that I checked both sides. Now, if I have one side that's running hotter than the other side and it's in the middle of the day, then it's telling me that I either have something going on with my brakes, with my bearings or I might have too much weight on one side of the vehicle versus the other. I might have to shift some of that weight in the compartments around. It's also good with trailers. I can kinda tell too, if my brakes are set up a little hot, you'll see it when you're going down the road if you've got them set a little higher on that, they're gonna wear a lot more. You're gonna get a lot more heat out of it. Now, this is a good tool to have, although I use this one here, this is IR Sonic measure by Ryobi and I got it at home improvement store. Just about any of those that sell the Ryobi brand tools and that type of stuff we'll have this. The reason I got this one, it does two things. It not only gives me the heat, and let me get on the mode here. It'll show me temperature and either the metric or fahrenheit or centigrade. And then this one will also do distance and I'm gonna put it here, you'll see that I can actually take it up to about 50 feet and see how many feet and inches that I have. And so, when I pull into a campground, if I don't know the branch that's hanging over the campground area is low enough to do damage, I can just simply hit this deal here and it's gonna give me an infrared, and it's gonna give me a distance where we see 12 feet, 3 inches from the ceiling that we have in here. I'd wanna put it on the ground and it would tell me exactly where it's at. If I wanna know how far the campground site is, say I got a 37 foot motorhome and I only have 34 feet in the campground, I can hit the tree or picnic table or something. The other thing I can do is, can I bring my slide room out? You know, if I've got the three foot slide room, I could just kinda hit where that post is at quickly. So, it's a nice kinda piece to have. It does not only the heat to make sure you're running cooler in your axles, but it does a distance. So, you might not do some damage when you get into the campground.
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