Dexter Single Axle Heavy Duty Suspension Kit - Double Eye Springs

Video Transcript for Dexter Single Axle Heavy Duty Suspension Installation

Hi there, trailer owners. Today we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install Dexter's Single Axle Shackle and Bolt kit. In this kit, you're gonna receive your bolts for replacing both your spring eye and your shackles as well as heavy duty upgraded shackles. This isn't a wet bolt kit. This is just a standard shackle bolt kit, so if you've got your self-lubricating Never Fail style bushings, then this is gonna be great to get your old hardware that may be worn out replaced. We also sell replacement bushings and these springs here if the damage has gone too far beyond just the bolts and the bushings.

And here you can see our shackles. They are a little bit thicker than your standard shackles, so that makes them heavy duty. They can stand up to heavier loads a little bit better than the traditional ones that your trailer will come with. That's just gonna help extend the life of your components because if we're holding all of our suspension components in place and everything's pivoting and moving the way it's supposed to, everything's controlled at that point and we're kinda determining how the loads are being dispersed into the frame. Once our bushings and shackles start to wear out and play gets in there, there's a lot of momentum that builds up between the parts and it can really cause it to slam and start to wear out your components.

It's no longer in control at that point. Everything's just kinda starting to wear itself apart. So by upgrading everything here and making sure everything is nice and smooth, without any play, that's just gonna further extend the life of your trailer and the rest of its components. Heavy duty replacement shackle bolt kits are a great replacement if you just got one that's worn out. They're gonna be a little bit stronger heavy duty and they are gonna be basically like a direct replacement because it's designed to work with your one and three-quarter-inch wide spring eye leaf spring, which is kinda your standard on these.

And they have 9/16th outside diameter for the bolts and 9/16th, so they fit 9/16th inner diameter bushings. Now while this is a nice replacement kit if you're just trying to get your trailer back up and running again. I would recommend though, if you're wanting to have something that's a little bit even more heavy duty and a little bit stronger and something that's gonna last a long time, particularly if you spend time maintaining your trailer, I would recommend Dexter's Heavy Duty Wet Bolt Kit. It's gonna have even thicker shackles at about a half-an-inch thick, so they're gonna be much heavier duty than what these ones are. So, it's a really big upgrade.

And the bolts that come included with the wet bolt kit will have zerks at the end, so you can grease it. It also comes with replacement bushings 'cause the bushings that are in here right now that these work with are your Never Fail, your self-lubricating plastic style bushings. And those bushings are great for lighter duty applications, especially if you don't really want to spend time maintaining your trailer and checking it over and stuff like that. If you just wanna hook it up and use it, I would recommend that you stay with the Never Fail bushings, the self-lubricating style. But if you're really adamant about maintaining your trailer and checking it before every trip, the Wet Bolt kit is gonna last a lot longer than the Never Fail as long as you're greasing them. If you're not somebody that wants to spend time greasing though, then stick with these because these will last longer than your wet bolts if you don't grease your wet bolts. But if you do spend time maintaining those wet bolts, they are gonna give you more service life and you're gonna be able to kinda beat them up a little bit more than this style here. You can find both of those here at etrailer and they're both designed to work with your single axle one and three-quarter-inch spring eyes. Now as far as replacing these goes, it's pretty easy. You just have to get your old ones out and these basically just slide right in. Removing the old ones can be difficult, depending if they're kind of seized in there due to rust, if it's all worn out and you got a lot of slop, then they're probably gonna fall out of there pretty easily. This one here had quite a bit of slop in it, so it's gonna come apart pretty easy. If you had a trailer that sat and it had a lot of rust on it, that one you might wanna consider getting some penetrating oil and soaking them down beforehand before you get in there to take them off. So now we've covered some of the features, why don't you follow along with me and we'll show you how to get these installed. We'll begin our installation by lifting up our trailer and supporting the frame with jack stands. We're using our lifts here to support our frame. If you're doing both sides like this, it's easier if we just lift the whole thing up 'cause if you do one side at a time, you gotta make sure you chock that wheel over there. So we're gonna lift up this side and it has potential to move, so it's just kinda easier to lift the whole thing. Once we get it up in the air, we're gonna take the wheel off and we'll get that out of the way so we can access our hardware. And then we're gonna take a jack, just the floor jack here and we're just gonna slide it right underneath and butt it up against the bottom of the axle. We don't really wanna put any pressure on it, we're just trying to support it at this point. And that's good enough right there. So now that we've got it supported, we can remove our old hardware here. We got our shackles here on the end we're gonna remove and you can see those are nice and loose and pretty worn out. We're also gonna be replacing the spring eye bolt on the other side of our leaf spring. The size you're gonna use is gonna vary depending upon your previous hardware. Oftentimes the inside nut is smaller, like an 11/16th, but on this older trailer here, it's pretty large. So we got a 22 for the inside and 21 for the outside or a 13/16th or a 7/8th, so both fairly similar sizes. So we're gonna remove all the nuts. And normally when you remove these, you don't need to hold the head of the bolt. But once they get all old and worn out, they end up slipping inside of here, so we're gonna hold it so we don't have to worry about that issue. You can see it slipping in there right now. And now we're just moving over to the other side of our leaf spring here to the spring eye bolt. We're gonna get this one removed as well. So now we're on the inside of the frame. We are looking from top down 'cause this trailer doesn't have any boards on it. Normally you'll be looking from the bottom, but this is the bolt that goes through the spring eye. To get this one out, since it's normally splined in there and we don't wanna mushroom the end of the bolt 'cause that could spread it out and make it get caught up inside and then it's really hard to remove. So the nut that we had just removed, you thread it back on there, just a couple of turns like that. And that's gonna give us a striking area that's not gonna damage our bolt. And we just wanna give it a tap like that. You usually do have to hit it pretty hard. This one we saw with spinning already, so the splines we're wore out, but you're just trying to get it to break free from those splines 'cause then it should tap out fairly easy the rest of the way. Now after we get it this far, it taps out a lot easier, but it's probably gonna be too hard for you to just pull it straight out of there. Sometimes you get lucky and you can just yank it and pull it from the other side, but more often than not, it's gonna be just a little bit too hard. So we're just gonna use another bolt. You can use anything. A screwdriver even works pretty well 'cause you shouldn't really need to have to hit it that hard. It's just gonna be more difficult than I can pull out by hand. 'Cause you're really just kind of baby tapping it right here. And it came right out of there. And then these are kinda the same way. We're just gonna tap these out. Little taps and then we can just slide it all the way out of there. So now we've got those removed. Our customer had previously replaced his axle and his leaf springs, but he put it all back together with his old hardware. He didn't think about the hardware. So normally when you pull these out and you're replacing them, you wanna inspect your leaf springs to make sure that there's no damage. Now these are brand new here, but what you would usually see if there is damage to your leaf spring, the bushing that's located in here, you can see this is one of those plastic, Never Fail self-lubricating bushings, oftentimes you'll see kinda an oval shape up and down or there may actually be a split in the plastic bushing or it could be completely gone. If it is, you wanna replace your bushings while doing this as well. You can get these here at etrailer. If everything looks okay with the bushing, you can go ahead and put it back together if you'd replaced them recently or they're new like this here. Another thing you wanna pay attention to if there is damage to your bushing here, especially if the bushing is completely missing, is the hole where your eye is here on your leaf spring. It should be fairly round just like you see here. Maybe with a small exception of where the two kinda meet the split there, but they're usually very round. If this is oval-shaped or you can see it's got a lot of really shiny marks on one side where it's kinda smashed the bolt up into it, your leaf spring is damaged at that point and you should really replace it because even if you replace the bushing, that bushing is likely gonna wear out prematurely because of the excess play around it and then you're just gonna kinda be in the same boat having play and that's just gonna cause all your other components to wear out. You also wanna inspect your hangers here for your leaf springs on both sides and just make sure that they are nice round holes and that they're not all smashed up and down. If you have play in there, then you can get similar things where it's just gonna start wearing components out. So everything looks good here since we've got new leaf springs and the hangers all look okay. We're ready to go ahead and re-install our components using our new hardware. So here we can see our new replacement shackles here from Dexter. It is a heavy duty shackle, so it's usually a little bit thicker than what your previous shackles were. You'll also see here that the ends here are smooth portion where our shaft will slide through. We don't have any rust or anything on there and that's gonna ensure that it's not prematurely wearing out these bushings because we have nice smooth surfaces to ride on our bushings. So now we're gonna go ahead and install them. So you can see here that when we go to put it in, we're a little bit off, that's not a big deal. You can lower down our axle a little bit. That's why we've got our jack under here supporting it. We're just gonna lower that down just a little bit and then check our fit in it once again. Looks like we need to go down just a smidge more and then it can slide together like butter, just like that if you've got it all lined up. And then on the other side, we're gonna place our shackle strap. Make sure that slides over the flat portion of your attaching bolts. And then we're just gonna take the nuts that come in our kit and place those on there. And I like to leave these loose and go ahead and get the other bolt installed and then we'll go back and tighten down all the hardware at the same time. Then we come over here to this side. To get this side installed, all you're really looking for is just looking straight through to see your bushing there. We'll use our jack to raise and lower it as necessary and I like to use a little pry bar for little subtle adjustments, moving it slightly forward or backward as necessary until our bushing and hole for our spring eye all lines up. Once it does, we take our new bolt and we're just gonna slide that into place. Now it's not uncommon once you slide it through there that on the other side you have to tweak your jack and the angle of your leaf spring here just a little bit to get it to go all the way through. And that was pretty much it. We just hit the jack just a little tiny bit and then gave it a baby tap and it went all the way in. You can see here, these serrated edges located on this bolt, you wanna go ahead and get those seated because we really don't want this bolt to turn when we're trying to tighten it down. So we're just gonna tap that. And that's probably good enough. You don't wanna go crazy hitting it 'cause we don't wanna bend our spring hanger here. So once you get it seated like that, even if it's not all the way flush, we can go ahead and finish putting our hardware on and getting that tightened down and we can come back and tap this after it's got some bolt pressure on it and it should drop the rest of the way in. So you're on the other side. We're just gonna use an 11/16th socket to tighten this down. And we're gonna repeat that for our other bolts on the other side as well. So now that we've got some bolt pressure on it, we are just gonna come back to the head of this one and give it some taps to get it to fully seat. And that looks like that took up the rest of the gap, so now we can just go back and torque our hardware to the manufacturer's specifications. And now with our hardware all tightened down, that will complete our installation on this side here. We can put our tire back on, get that on the ground and get it torqued up. And then if you're replacing the other side, just perform the same procedures over there as well. And that completes our look at Dexter's Single Axle Shackle and Bolt Kit..