Full-time RV living is filled with adventure, but there are a few adventures that you really don’t expect. Our travel trailer is over a decade old, so it’s not surprising that the original crank tongue jack would eventually cause some trouble.
We had no issues the first three months on the road, but the tongue jack got harder to crank after we had hitched and unhitched the trailer a few dozen times. I did a bit of research and learned how to lubricate the jack, but of course, life got in the way and the maintenance work for the tongue jack never happened.
As you can probably guess, my procrastination eventually led to disaster—a broken roll-pin which secured the crank to the gears on the inside of the tongue jack. The result was a free-spinning crank. Since I had already done the research on how to lubricate the tongue jack, I pulled up the videos I had already watched to see what the roll-pin looked like when it wasn’t broken and then did a Google Maps search to see if there was a home depot or auto parts store nearby. Luckily, there was a Napa Auto Parts store just a mile away. Since our truck was half hitched up to the trailer when the pin broke, I had to ride to the store on my bike. Luckily Napa had a roll-pin that was just the right size, resulting in our cheapest RV repair to date—a mere 28 cents.
Fixing the travel trailer tongue jack was pretty simple. All I had to do was remove the protective cap at the top, re-insert the crank into the gears and fasten everything back into place by hammering in the new roll-pin. Once everything was put back together, we were able to get the trailer completely hitched up to the truck and head to our next campground with the intention of fully removing the jack to lubricate it once we arrived.
But rather than putting in the time and effort into lubricating the crank jack, I decided to treat myself to an upgrade. I removed the old tongue jack and swapped it out with a new Ulta Fab Ultra 3502 Electric Tongue Jack. I can’t tell you how happy I am with the decision to upgrade. Using the old crank jack wasn’t hard, but it did get annoying when trying to level the trailer. With the new electric jack, I can now hitch or unhitch the trailer without breaking a sweat. The Ulta Fab Ultra 3502 Electric Tongue Jack isn’t the most expensive or check electric tongue jack out there, but the 8-inches of travel and 3,500 lbs. of lifting power were more than adequate for our trailer.
If you have any questions about the install process, check out the video or just leave a comment below.
