The Outdoors

By Scott Rall, Outdoors Columnist

When it comes to luck mine is normally petty sour. Even my closest friends call me the character on the Snoopy cartoon. I can’t remember what his name was but he was the guy that always had the rain cloud following him around. I have said many times, if it can happen to anyone it will usually happen to me. When my friends have bad luck they refer to it as “the luck of the Scoot.” Scoot is my nickname.

About two weeks before the fishing opener, I needed to get my boat ready for the warmer days that seemed to be hiding from us. There were about a dozen things to check on before heading out on the road.

One of the most important was the wheel bearings on the trailer and the tires. I normally get the bearings serviced at the local auto shop so I have not had a lot of issues in this department, but I certainly see a lot of trailer bearing issues with other folks.

Boat trailer bearing problems are more common on boat trailers than other trailers in general. This is because they get dipped in and out of the water a lot. When you drive down the road, even if the bearings are in good shape, they warm up. When you take a boat axle with warm bearings and back it into the water the cool water hits the warm bearings and when things cool, they contract.

It is this contraction that tends to draw water past the axle seal and this water intrusion contaminates the grease in the wheel bearings and causes the bearing grease to lose its lubricating elements. It is either contaminated grease or the lack of it that makes a wheel bearing over heat and renders the trailer dead on the side of the road.

They make a product that is called a bearing buddy. These cover the exposed end of the spindle and they are spring loaded When the bearings are cooled by the lake water the spring allows the cap to collapse (the spring lets the bearing cap collapse). It’s this ability to collapse that keeps the water from getting sucked into the bearing past the axle seal.

These have made it a lot easier to add grease periodically and has reduced bearing issues dramatically. The other issue I can not seem to avoid is tire issues. I always make sure my tire pressures are correct, and I still have routine tire issues. On one trip to Lake Winnebegosh I managed to destroy all three tires on my boat. Both the ones I left with and the spare all made it home as scrap for the recycler.

I do a fair amount of back roads fishing so gravel roads and other out-of-the-way spots get my visits. It might be a nail or screw and others are just plain unexplainable. If you can identify a low tire before it goes flat you can often prevent the dreaded jack and tire iron episodes.

They make a tire pressure sensor kit you can add to any trailer you own that monitors tire pressure. These work much like a low tire warning available on newer cars and trucks. If you can be alerted to a low tire before it gets totally destroyed you can eliminate more then a few break downs on the road.

I purchased one of these remote sensor kits and installed sensors on my boat, my camper, my six-hole dog trailer and the trailer I carry my Polaris Ranger on. The sensors screw onto the valve stem with a locking nut. The unit with eight sensors coast about $550. I carry two separate tire pumps in my truck. One runs on the cigarette lighter plugin and the other is a standalone unit from Makita Tools. It uses a rechargeable cordless drill battery. The first one works great if you are close enough to a cigarette lighter, but they don’t usually have enough cord to reach the back end of a trailer.

Like just about everything these days, they have far more features than the average person might ever need. The unit I have can monitor up to 24 different trailers. How many folks have 24 different trailers?

You set the unit for the different pressures required by each different load rated tire. If the tire pressure drops more than five pounds from the desired setting the unit will sound an audio alarm in the cab of the tow vehicle. It will do the same thing if tire temperatures exceed the preset limit of the monitor.

I had a friend who towed his camper all the way to Utah and back and ended up in the Walmart parking lot overnight 100 miles from his home in Woodbury. If he could have added a little air when he should have, he could have easily made it home and not had to purchase a new $200 tire.

Cost savings is important but the safety of never laying on the side of the road in the dark on a busy highway with a jack and a tire iron is my primary reason to utilize this pretty expensive problem limiter.

Bearing and tires seem to be my nemesis. Even though my routine maintenance program is 100% they still seem to catch up with me. Here is hoping my summer season has not one single flat tire in it. I will have to keep my fingers crossed.