Electric Trailer Brake Assembly - Self-Adjusting - 10" - Left Hand - 3,500 lbs

Video Transcript for etrailer Electric Trailer Brake Kit Review

Speaker 1: Today we're going to be taking a look at the E-Trailer 10-Inch Self-Adjusting Electric Trailer Brake kit offering the left, and right hand brake assemblies designed for use on 3500 pound axles. The part number is AKEBRK-35-SA. Now, these are available in just the left or right as well. Part number for the left is AKEBRK-35L-SA, and for the right part number is AKEBRK-35R-SA. Now, the E-Trailer brake assembly is going to be the perfect solution for either added or replacing brakes on your trailer. This is an electric type assembly.

We've got a magnet here when energized it sticks to the hub. Causes this arm.To separate you can see that moves. We get a separation here, which expands our shoes onto our drone giving us this stopping force. Now, there are a couple of reasons I like the complete assembly idea rather than just buying shoes, and hardware, and stuff like that. One, changing a complete brake assembly is much quicker than trying to change the shoes, and also if you just buy a set of shoes to put on here, everything else in this system is still old.

It still has corrosion on it, it still has issues. With a complete assembly we're getting a brand new magnet that has no wear on it, our shoe keepers, our springs, our adjustment cable, the adjuster that we have down here, everything is brand new so we know it's going to work properly.Something else you'll find that's an advantage to this style of assembly with the self-adjustment in it versus the older traditional style is that these are meant to adjust themselves. As your drums wear. On our shoes here, that distance is going to get smaller, so we need these to expand out slightly to help keep good contact on that drum. Our star adjuster is going to rotate clicking into position on the tab we have here on the back allowing to again just self-adjust.

It's going to be the correct position each time. I like this type of star adjuster. It has minor increments of adjustments, so this is going to be more fine-tuned. We're not going to be stuck for an extended period of time with poor performing breaks because it can't quite get to that next adjustment point.With the finer adjustments we have here our brakes can stay more fine tuned to the size they need to. That's going to help to eliminate some of that brake fade when your shoes wear down, and you can't quite get to that next adjustment.

It's something you kind of had with the older traditional style adjusters, but now that they're making them more fine tuned we can get better performance out of the assemblies.Now, the shoes themselves are very high quality. We've got automotive grade friction material. The friction material has been bonded to the shoe itself, so we're not going to have to worry about the rivets that used to be in there. Those can kind of cause us premature life because the rivet head would be stuck up, and we'd start to get some wear. This is also going to help to reduce the risk of it cracking, or maybe crumbling, getting locked up, and causing our tire to lock, and not spin freely. Something else that I like about the assembly, all of the components are corrosion resistant, so even with the higher corrosion properties that we typically get out of friction material they're not going to have to worry about crazy amounts of rust, or anything like that forming in our assembly causing it not to work as good as it could.Now, when you get your assemblies if you do decide to get left and right, there's a pretty easy way to tell them apart. The left assembly, our magnet will be on the bottom, and our larger shoe is going to be on the back. That's our primary shoe. You see here on the front Our shoe is going to be a little bit shorter. That's our secondary shoe. That's always going to be towards the front of our trailer. These are going to be the 10-inch assembly, so we get 10 inches there, and then we've got a 2 and a quarter inch pad widths. You want to make sure that's what your trailer has for that's what's going to work with the hubs that you've purchased. If you're adding brakes, it's designed to work with your 13, 14, and 15 inch tires, and on 3500 pound axles with the 4 bolt rake flange.Now, to begin your installation we need to get our tire, and our old hub off. Now, that doesn't matter if you already have existing brakes, and you want to change those, or like use you're going to be adding new brakes to a trailer. Now, you want to use a hammer. I typically like to use a dead blow hammer. You just want to start tapping on this cap. You can see how it's going to create a little bit of a gap there. Kind of tap back towards you, and you'll be able to pop that off. Now, once that's off you want to clean your spindle here, you want to find your cotter pin. Ours has a cotter pin anyway. Yours may have a what they call more like a nut keeper, which should be something that slides over, but regardless we want to get that pulled out.Since we have our cotter pin we're just going to straighten that out. If you have your other style you'll just pop that off. I like to use side cutters because you can kind of get a hold of them, then just kind of pull it out. Now, you can try to save your cotter pin if you want, or get a replacement. You can see this is a pretty fresh cotter pin. If we straighten that out we should be able to just put it back in there. If you damage it though just get a new one to replace it.Now, we'll take our nut off. Not a lot of tension on this, you probably not going to need a wrench or anything. Just some pliers, we're going to hang on to this, and also the washer that's in behind it. The bushing that's in behind it. You can see if we wiggle this a little bit, pull that off there. A little flat side on it. That's always going to go to the flat side of your spindle. Now, we'll just gently pull outward on that, then we can take our assembly off. Now, if you have a drum assembly already, this is going to be pretty much the same process. The process on removing it. You're just going to have your brake assembly behind it. Now, if you don't have brakes, and you're going to be adding them to your trailer, you want to be sure you have your 4-bolt flange. That's going to ensure that these brakes are going to work for you.Now, we'll clean our spindle up really well. Since this did have . You can see that discoloration, that rusting in there that means moisture has been in here. We really need to check for any pinning, or any issues like that, that we might encounter on our spindle. You want it to be nice and smooth. Now, since we're going to be adding brakes to the trailer, we of course aren't going to have any assemblies to remove. But take a look here on the backside of the assembly, and it would give you an idea of what you'll need to do if you are removing brakes. You'll have four studs that stick through the backing plate. They're going to go through that mounting flange. On the back of that you should have a nut, and a lock washer. You want to remove all those, but hang on to them because you're going to reuse them.Once that's off and out of the way we can take our new assembly, slide it right into that flange, we want the magnet to be here at the bottom. Now, if you're adding new brakes if you don't already have existing brakes, we do have a brake hardware kit. The part number is BIK-00. That's going to give you your lock washer, and your nut. You're going to need one kit for each assembly, so if you're doing two like we're doing you're going to need two. If you're doing four to four, six to six. Now, we'll take that, we're going to thread it right onto those studs, we'll place your lock washer on first, and then our hex nut. You'll do that at all four locations.Now, you'll use an 11/16th socket. We need to snug down all four of our bolts, then we'll torque them. Alright. Now, let's head over to the opposite side, and we'll do the same thing there. We're ready to connect our wires. We got two green wires that are coming out of the back of the assembly. It doesn't matter which one you use for what. One needs to go to ground, and the other needs to go to the brake controller signal, which will come through your seven way. Now, since our trailer did not have a seven pull on it, it started with a four pull like a non-brake setup. We used part number ET7WK, which is going to give you a seven pull round for the front. It gives you a junction box, and the wire that you'll need to run back here, and make your connection.Once we get back here in that kit, we've got heat shrink butt connectors. You can pick these up as part number DW05745. We're just going to get those crimped on, and then with or without the brakes you'll either have your new wire that you've ran back here, or your existing brake wire that was on your trailer. Those will connect to those wires. We'll just use a heat source. It could be a heat gun, we can use a mini torch. We're using a lighter here as you can see. We're just going to apply a little bit of heat at a time to these. You'll see them start to shrink down. When it finally does shrink down fully it looks like the wire magnifies a little bit. It kind of looks like it gets a little bit bigger. You can kind of see there. Then on this far end there will be a little bit of clear gel that comes out of it.Once we have these shrunk down properly as you can see, you want to make sure there's enough slack here for movement because the suspension is going to go up and down a little bit. Then you're ready if you're just replacing an old brake assembly to get your hub back on after you repack the bearing. If you're adding brakes like what we're doing today then we'll take our new hub, and we'll put it on. Hi guys. We brought in Dave now to get kind of a second set of eyes on the assembly, and see if there's anything I missed that he might be able to pick up, and give you some more information. This is the new 10-inch, 2 and a quarter inch wide brake assembly. It looks like it's nice. Is there anything you see that kind of stands out on this that we don't see on a lot of the other type assemblies we get through here. Dave: Well, I did notice it's got the bonded pads, which will prevent rivet gouging when the pads start to get low to save your drum. Speaker 1: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Dave: I did also notice that on the adjuster here it's got this nice roller style to allow for easier free movement for better adjustment. Speaker 1: It is nice. That's something we don't often see. That just allows that a little bit freer movement so that it'll adjust more readily. There's something else that I just kind of noticed looking at that. There's a couple of plugs here on the back side. Even if you did for some reason need to manually adjust it, at least you'd be able to get to them. Some don't really offer that access point to get in there. Dave: Yeah, that's a nice feature too. Other than that it's got all the standards that you would see in a typical system. It looks like it'll hold up fine. Speaker 1: It all looks of the same quality we see on anything else. Dave: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Speaker 1: Alright. Perfect. Thanks man. Dave: Alright. No problem. Speaker 1: That's going to complete our installation of the E-Trailer Self-Adjusting 10-Inch Electric Trailer Brake Kit.