boat trailer tires

guywhofishes

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the axle can also be bent - causing both tires to point up down in or out or some awful combo depending on the orientation of the bend.
 


1lessdog

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I don't believe you would "align" your trailer tires any more than you would align your rear wheels on your vehicles!

I have seen Trailers with axles out of line. A lot of the problems come from, dropping your trailer of the end of ramp and then having to back up and take a run to get out of the hole. Causing the axle to be driven back.

I once seen a guy hook a chain to his rear axle to pull another guy out. ( that was before receiver hitches ) and jerked on the chain to pull him out. You should have seen that pickup going down the road. The back end looked like it was trying to pass the front end.
 

SDMF

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Buddy hit a deer with his boat trailer. I was 300yds behind and watched it happen. You could see marks on the trailer frame where it moved the axle back ~3-4". We loosened the u-bolts and pounded until we got the bolts back over the original marks. The trailer still dog-tracked quite a bit and he ruined a set of nearly new tires in ~250Mi getting home.
 
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SDMF

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I guess I wasn't considering stupidity or accidents.

A boat trailer axle isn't exactly precision eqiupment. It's square tubing with hardened axle's welded onto the end then U-Bolted to rectangle steel/AL tubing. Add tolerance stacking to repeated small bumps and potholes @ ND highway speeds can move and tweak things.

Someone mentioned 12K Mi on a set of trailer tires since '08. That's give or take 1K/yr. There are folks who put that many miles on for a 3-4 day trip. I know I've put close to 10K Mi on a boat trailer in a single summer several times. I had that trailer aligned 2X in the 7 years I owned it when the tire wear started to look uneven.

Prior to having a place to leave my boat in Devils Lake, I pulled it from Fargo 10+ weekends/yr. ~500Mi round-trip/weekend + the odd trip to the Mo River early, the NW Angle, Oahe, and it's not hard to pile up miles fast.
 
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Allen

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Right, I live near Bismarck and fish some 60 times a year, at a minimum. In the spring those trips are fairly short, about 50 mile roundtrip. By the end of summer I am doing 170 mile round trips on average. So I figure I'm in the range of 6k miles a year on my trailer tires. If you smack a pothole, porcupine (been there, done that), drive too fast on washboard roads, etc, etc and you get a lot of opportunities to screw up the trailer's alignment and it's easy to see on the tire wear.

My Toon's trailer with it's double axles and small diameter tires is really susceptible to wearing badly. I suppose I only got about 10k on its first set before they needed to be replaced.
 

sl1000794

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My trailer never left asphalt - I only went to the ocean and you could never go off the end of the ramp.
 

SDMF

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I once seen a guy hook a chain to his rear axle to pull another guy out. ( that was before receiver hitches ) and jerked on the chain to pull him out. You should have seen that pickup going down the road. The back end looked like it was trying to pass the front end.

I bet that truck ate U-Joints pretty regular after that too!
 

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