Upgrading Safety Chains

Safety chains are a requirement on trailers. And it's important to not only inspect them but make sure that they are compliant with most of the road use laws out in the United States. Now, these here, it's from 1996. So it's got an open face. A lot of states now are requiring some type of a restraining bar spring loaded latch in here because when you hook these up, they could easily move around a little bit and could even slip out. So this one we're going to change. Also, we noticed when we are using a weight distribution hitch, the actual hitch is going to come out about to where we're at now and you can see that we don't have enough space so we could add a couple of bars to this. So what we're going to do is take this chain and instead of upgrading the entire chain in here, we're just going to go and put this new clip in here and it's a 5 16 th clip. So it's rated somewhere around the I'd say about £10,000 rating, which is way more than what we have here if you're ever going to remove your chains and replace them. Make sure you get one that is rated for the weight that you have. And you'll notice this one here says £7600 what it a strength, ultimate braking strength, £7600. So this one is adequate for this trailer. We're at about 6000 with this, I believe and we even it weighs less than that. So if you're going to upgrade, make sure you get a chain that's rated for what you've got here. But we're just going to take and get some new clips on here. So we're going to bend this straighten these out. It's just a little Cotter key pretty much in here and I'm not too worried about the rust that's in here because it's just surface rust, you know, we've done several things on that, but I'm not going to use that key. I got a new one that came with this here. Some of them bolt on as well. Put this back up over, take that out. Now, if I were going to lengthen this, I could do the same thing and add, you know, two or three, they make spacers that go along here. But again, you got to make sure it's rated for whatever you're going to be towing. We're just going to slide this back through like that, take our key, which is still new and I like to separate these. So we're going to bend one this way and take the other one and bend it around the other way. So we got them both going different directions. So now we got a safety latch on here that we know for a fact when we bounce around, normally you're going to have a little bit of, you know, you want to have a little bit of tension from gravity, but it's just a good idea to have this in here. So when hooking these up, then many state laws require that you have some kind of a cradle. So you criss cross. If this jumps off the ball, then you have something that will hold this on. So this one would go over to this side, this would go over to the other side. And again, we're a little short on these. So it would literally create a criss cross or a cradle that would hold those. Now, one last thing about these is that when you're hooking these up to our islets, those are always on the hitch. And I've had recently several letters that have come in commenting about the hitch broke away from the bumper because it's just, it's welded onto that bumper and it's not bolted on to anything else in here or the bumper membrane that's going across the crossbar. So if that hitch comes off and you got your safety cables are on that hitch, which is typically going to happen, then you're going to have that whole thing goes with the hitch. That's why it's important to have your breakaway cable hooked to something totally different. I don't recommend hooking the chains to something different because then you're starting to put more holes in that bumper support in there, but at least have the breakaway cables. But keep in mind those are hooked to that hit. So just periodically take a look at that, make sure you got good connections and that these ever get drug on the ground and start to get hairline cracks and stuff you want to replace them.