Electric stabilizers

Huntindog wrote:
OK front to rear.
It is interesting that you were able to kink them like that.
I often encounter just that situation, and due to the quick to ground (QTG) feature, it simply stalls the motor with little lift...
FYI, QTG is a feature on most stabilizing jacks.
What it does is lower the jack a large amount with each turn of the screw initially, and less with each subsequent turn. This makes the jack weaker due to a taller effective gear ratio at the beginning of deployment, but faster. As it reaches the end of its travel the jack slows down due to a lower effective gear ratio, but is much stronger. Hence the name "Quick to Ground"
This why it would be impossible for the motor to supply enough force to kink the jack as you describe.... It would need some help.

What will cause them to kink would be if the tongue jack was retracted while the stabilizers were deployed in that position.... But that would damage just about any stabilizing jack.

That is the ONLY way I can see that happening.
And it is NOT the fault of the jack. They were never designed to be the sole source of support.

As for Northwood frames, they are some of the better ones, but they are not all that different than many other TT frames... I strongly suspect that Northwoods would advise against using jacks like you desire.

I'm beginning to wonder if we're talking about the same jacks.

Mine seem to go down at the same speed all the time. I'll have to look at the threads, but I suspect the rod is threaded the same over its full length.

And I've never seen the motors stall (other than when one was frozen solid). In fact I've often thought that the motors Lippert put on were *too* strong, or stronger than the arms anyway. Otherwise how could they kink the arms when lowering?

I'm quite sure there was no shift in support from the tongue jack when my fronts kinked. There was a loud bang as I was lowering the arms, and sure enough, there was a ripple in the side walls of the arms right where the angle support come in. Luckily not as bad as what happened to the rears.

Pretty sure this happened when the 110VAC was connected so the motors would have had the full 13.6V of the converter as well as the batteries. Maybe if it was batteries only, and weaker batteries at lower voltage the motors would stall without kinking the arm. Dunno.

But whatever the reason, I really don't want to have to worry about it in the future. Hence the reinforcements.