Disc Brakes
Has anyone converted their fifth wheel to disc brakes? I am thinking of upgrading mine and was wondering if anyone has experience with conversion...
Forum Discussion
jshupe wrote:
Looked into it today and found that one of the caliper guide bolts backed itself completely out of the sleeve. Since it was the bottom caliper bolt, the bottom of the caliper was resting against the rotor. I contacted Ron at PerformanceTrailerBraking and he is sending a new bolt. He said these have a tendency to back themselves out, and to use Loctite the next go around, which I will add for all of the guide bolts. I'm not convinced it was torqued correctly to begin with, but Loctite and retorquing to the proper spec should keep it from repeating itself.
300mi home today averaged 8.1mpg, I've made the same trip many times and usually get 10mpg or so.
I found on another forum that the Kodiak 7K caliper uses the same pads as the 1990 Buick Century Limited, and somewhere else that the Titan and Kodiak calipers have interchangeable parts. So instead of waiting for the caliper guide bolt to arrive in the mail, I sourced a guide bolt for one of those Century calipers at Advance Auto Parts. It is the same length, diameter, and threading, so it worked great in the bottom hole. However, the head on the Titan bolt is machined differently to allow you to grab onto it with a socket, where you have to use an Allen on Century bolt. This turns out to be really important on my rig, because I can't get an Allen bit on a ratchet in front of the leaf to tighten the top caliper bolt, and if I tried with a key I probably couldn't get it tight enough. So the top must use the Titan bolt, while there is plenty of room to get the Century bolt sufficiently tight on the bottom.
I did this today so that I could get it back to the storage lot before the HOA started complaining, and so took it on a test drive to the storage lot approximately 12 miles away. I got 7mpg in heavy stop and go (rush hour) traffic with the trailer, which I feel is about right for a properly functioning trailer. Much better than I would expect if the issue still exists since I averaged only 6.4 and 8.1 on the last two highway trips, and the 8.1 included some unloaded driving.
