All we wanted to do was take her to the car wash...

"Eventually..." still had a bunch of grime on her bottom from sitting in Elephant Butte last summer, so we decided to take her to the car wash and power blast her clean.  It would also be a great test for the new truck since we hadn't actually pulled her with it yet.  We had just installed the new brake controller and were very excited to try it out.  We backed the truck up to the trailer, and plugged in the cable.  We turned on the truck lights, stepped on the brakes, and... no lights on the trailer.

We hadn't used the trailer since last fall, so we had anticipated a little troubleshooting.  We pulled out the trusty multi-meter and started testing connections.  After about an hour of trial and error we figured out our mistake.  The trailer lights ground through the hitch to the truck chassis and we hadn't actually put the trailer on the ball!  We were just happy to find everything working, even if we did feel a little silly.

Part of the reason that we hadn't put the trailer onto the hitch ball, was that the ball currently on the truck was too small.  We knew that we would have to switch out to the 2" ball, but we had wanted to check the lights first.  Once we got the lights working, we attacked the hitch and ball.  Experienced towers recommend that you put anti-seize on the ball to stop the nut from seizing on.  It turns out that you should definitely heed that recommendation.   John has been wanted a vise for a while now, so this was a good opportunity.  After a trip to the store for the vise and a pipe wrench, we were able to switch out the smaller (wimpier) ball for our 2".

By then it was dark and looking gloomy, so we decided to wait until the next day to actually take her for a spin.  You know how they say that the way to get it to rain is to wash your car?  Well, I guess it works preemptively for boats.  Even though it's New Mexico, it rained all night and was drizzly the next day.  But since we figured we'd get wet at the car wash anyways, it didn't phase us.  We hopped in the truck and headed out.

We made it about half a block before we realized that we hadn't double checked the lights.  We pulled over and I hopped out and ran to the back of the trailer.  No lights!  So much for taking her for a spin.  I got back in the truck and we went around the block and back home.

After a little more trouble shooting with the multi-meter we realized that the problem was our old friend, the ground.  The ground wasn't making it through the ball to the hitch and then through the hitch to the truck chassis.  The hitch receiver is coated with plastic to prevent corrosion.  Turns out that it also prevents electrical contact.  The old ball had worn through a little and had been able to make contact the day before, but the new ball hadn't had a chance to wear in.  No big deal.  We decided to just take off the receiver, sand through the coating in a few strategic places, and presto, the problem would be solved.

We put down the jack to take the trailer off the ball.  The jack is pretty long, and doesn't swing up and out of the way like some models.  Because it doesn't leave much clearance, we had hit it getting the trailer down the curb, and it looked like the bump had bent the brackets and bolts.  It was so unstable that we weren't even comfortable leaving it on the jack briefly while we sanded the receiver.  So, we went on a mission to find a new bracket for the jack.


It seems that trailer jack manufacturers are very clever.  They don't sell just the jack brackets.  You have to purchase a new jack.  After going to all the auto parts stores and Tractor Supply (by the way, a very handy store), we came to terms with this fact and decided to go ahead and upgrade to a swing-out-of-the-way style jack.  Before leaving on our mission, we had cleverly measured the trailer tubing that we would be bracketing the jack to.  Before making our purchase we decided to measure the bracket that came with the jack, just to double check that it would fit.

One of the neat things about our trailer is that it has an extendable tongue to make it easier to get the boat in deep enough water when we're launching.  The inner tubing of the tongue is 3"x3" tubing.  The outer tubing, which our jack brackets to, is 3.5"x3.5".  This is all fine and good, until we're standing in the store, looking at our potential jack, whose brackets fit around 3"x3" or 4"x4" tubing.  It seems that those are the typical trailer tubing sizes.  And, as it turns out, that is the real reason why our brackets had gotten bent.  The extra room between the default bracket size and our odd trailer tubing had allowed the brackets to become skewed, and after a while, to bend from the weird torque.

We went ahead and got the jack.  By now it was dark again; another day spent on getting our boat to the car wash.  In the morning we fabricated a little block of wood to wedge into the bracket and take up the extra space left by our "special" tubing.  When we have access to a welder, we plan to weld the jack on, but until then the wood should keep the trailer fairly stable.

With it's wood spacer we were able to put the trailer on our new jack and take off the hitch to do our strategic sanding.  With the sanding complete and the receiver re-installed, the lights worked right away.  Only two days, a new vise, and a new jack, after we first started hooking up the trailer, we were ready to go to the car wash!  I'm happy to say that we made it there and back... eventually.  And "Eventually..." now has a clean bottom (that looks like it's ready for more bottom paint... a project for another day.)

The silver lining to this adventure, as it is with most of our simple projects that always seem to become more complex, is that we found, and fixed, a problem that we were previously unaware of.  It's always a bummer to spend more time and money than you anticipate on a project.  But it's definitely better to find the problem and get it fixed than to have something break (like your trailer jack... I'm picturing the jack brackets snapping and the boat toppling over onto our house...)  I guess it wasn't such a waste of the weekend after all!