Bal lock arm stabilizer bars?
My camper has the Lippert electric stabilizer jacks where both rear jacks lower with the press of a single button. Pressure is not applied to the trailer until both rear jacks have made contact with t...
Forum Discussion
Not sure where to start, so I will respond inside your post.
myredracer wrote:jbjuices wrote:That is normal and how they work.
Question on the Lippert system...on the back jacks, one side goes down first, hits the ground and then the other side goes down. It's brand new, so wondering if this should be fixed, or just how some systems work??
The electric stab. jacks should be run down only until they are snug and stable. TT frames/I-beams are designed to have a camber in them which means that they are a bit lower at the front and rear compared to where the axles are.I know a bit about camber, having researched this with JBarca when he was repairing his sagging frame. I even have pics of my TT on the production line that show the location of the welds that induce the camber. I did a lot of research to understand this, and even did some cambering of my own in my garage, welding beads on lengths of steel to see how it changed the shape, and properties of the piece.
You have it backwards. The welding beads are on the top of the frame rail. You cannot see them as the they are covered by the TT body.
This welding causes the frame to shrink in the area of the weld.
This shrinking causes the rear of the frame to be higher, NOT lower!
Another thing happens to metal when you do this. It gets springy.
The light pieces I experimented on felt lively and stronger compared to identical unwelded pieces. On my TT, and others I have seen,
the cambering welds are placed about where the axle hangers are located. I am unsure of the logic for this on the front portion of the frame, but I have never seen cambering beads on the bottom of a frame where my logic would put them Tightening them down more than needed can cause the frame to bend in the opposite direction causing racking of the superstructure above, twisting of the frame and possibly damage. As I mentioned previously, some frames flex a lot more than others - especially the ones with I-beams made from 3 pieces of sheet steel welded together.These concerns are valid... for traditional scissor jacks. Not for the lippert system. Just think about the front jacks for a moment: what happens when the hitch is on the ball or tongue jack?
All of the weight is at the very front of the frame!
So tightening the front jacks as tight as they will go, cannot impart any more force on the frame that the TJ or ball does. Even if they were strong enough to lift the front of the trailer completely off of the ball or TJ... It is still the same amount of force! And no,
they are not that strong.
Even our HD frame flexes more than I would have ever expected if I tighten the jacks any more than necessary. The dead bolt on our entry door would not work sometimes in first couple of years. Dealer claimed nothing wrong. Finally figured out the deadbolt and strike plate had insufficient clearance and by tightening the stab jacks even a little bit too much, it prevented the dead bolt from working. I filed some metal off the strike plate and that fixed it.
Do you have the Lippert system? It doesn't sound like it.
What could happen if a frame flexes too much? If your superstructure is aluminum-framed, welds can potentially fail like in the photo from a TT we used to have. Many TTs, esp. the ultralites, are built with the lightest, thinnest and least substantial materials to save weight and cost and you need to treat them accordingly.
I would never, ever own a TT with Lippert's auto-leveling Ground Control system. And if your frame ever breaks for any reason, it is always your fault, never Lippert's. Love their sales pitch "It can take up to an hour to get an RV level with manual jacks, chocks and wedges." It would be interesting to know how much these jacks wiggle around, esp. being oriented fore/aft.
