Safety Chain S-Hook - 7/16"

Video Transcript for Laclede Safety Chain S Hook Review

Hi there, safety conscious haulers. Today, we're gonna be taking a look at Laclede's class III S-hook. This S-hook has a 7/16 diameter, which means it's designed to work with quarter inch diameter safety chains. That'll slide right up in there. We can see that it fits perfectly fine inside. That's gonna be a class III rating, which gives it a 1,250 pound working load limit, and a minimum break limit of 5,000 pounds.

So, that's gonna be more than enough for our camper here. We've got two sets, so you add those two together and that gives you about 2,500 pounds together with two of these chains in total. To ensure a long-lasting operation of our chain, it's got a zinc plated coating on it to help protect against rust and corrosion, so you can get years of service out of it. This is going to be a crimped fit onto your chain, so you are gonna need a, probably a vise and a cut off wheel here. And if you wanna follow us along in the shop, we're gonna show you how to get an old damaged one off and get this new one on here.

So, you can see here why we're going to be replacing our S-hook. Our customer had hooked up to his trailer incorrectly and when he went to take off, the trailer stayed behind and the vehicle left and it ended up stretching out his chain, overextending it there, and it bent it. While it was still attached to the safety chain attachment on this hitch, it has spread it out quite a bit and this could be unsafe. It could possibly fall off of there if you hit certain bumps and things like that. It's not really secure like it was before.

Here you can see what it was supposed to look like. This is a brand new one here and this is what it used to be before the little accident that happened. So, we can go ahead and just replace just this part here. We inspected our chain for any damages and there's no damage on any of our links, so we can reuse this. It was just an issue with the S-hook there.

So, to get this replaced, the easiest thing to do is to take it over to a vise and do so. You may need to cut your chain off depending on how you've got it attached, or you could bring a cut off tool out to your trailer if you can't detach it. We've got quick links on here, so that'll make it a lot easier 'cause we can go inside to the vise to be able to do it. So, I've gone ahead and clamped it in the vise. You can sometimes spread these open, but they're so hard to spread open. You're often gonna save yourself some time and effort by just cutting it off of there. So, we're just gonna use a cut off wheel to trim this off, and then we can slide our chain out of there. And now we can take our chain and just slide it right off of there. We'll then get this removed. Just be careful when you're taking this off of there if you're near where you're cutting. It's probably pretty hot. The opposite side should be fairly cool, so we can grab it over here. And we'll just disconnect this from our vise. So now, we'll take our new one from Laclede here. This is gonna slide right on to our chain, and then we'll use our vise to crimp this right onto here. And we got it there till it touched. When you go to release this, it is gonna probably spring back open a little bit, so just make sure that there's no way your chain can come off of there. And you can see we've got a tiny little gap there. That's pretty similar to the gap that our old chain had. And we're nice and replaced. We're now ready to put this back onto our trailer and get it back into service. So now, we're back to our trailer. We've got our chain reattached to the trailer. Make sure that we're properly hooked up to our coupler. We've got all of our pins in, all of our connections made, we've crossed our chains. So, this is exactly what we wanna see. And this trailer is now ready to get back out there. And that completes our look at Laclede's class III S-hook..