Step Bolt For Double Eye Springs - 9/16" Diameter - Plain - 3" Long

Video Transcript for DIY Install: Step Bolt For Double Eye Springs on your 2020 Grand Design Momentum 5W Toy Hauler

Hi there, trailer owners. Today, we're gonna be taking a look at a replacement step bolt, in a 9/16" diameter for a 1 3/4-inch spring eye hanger. These are also known as shackle bolts. So, here we've got our old spring, and our new spring. And if we look at our old spring, you'll see, it's got a bunch of grease around the edges here. And if we look at the bushings inside of our old spring, we can see that the bushing is all worn out.

It's actually got a pretty big chunk missing out of it there. Now, when this happens, in most cases, you can drive those bushings out and you can replace them. But if a bushing just falls through, the spring needs to be replaced. We're gonna be upgrading to a new leaf spring on our trailer here. And if we look at the bushings on this one, it's a nice pre-installed bushing in there.

But the bushing that's in here is a self-lubricating bushing. You can see, it's made of a, kind of a plastic-style-type of bushing, versus the old ones we had that we're lubricated. Those are bronze bushings. So, when we go to put our new spring in, when we go to reuse our bolts, the bolts that we're previously in there we're wet bolts. And these are used, so you can inject grease in there to lubricate between the bolt and the bushings.

So that way, everything stays free. And that works out really well for extending the life of your bushings by putting them grease, but you can see that they do still wear out. When you go to put in a different type of bushing that is self-lubricating, you don't wanna have any grease in there. The grease can actually deteriorate the bushing and cause it to wear out prematurely. So we don't want to use these old wet bolts 'cause they do have some grease in there, and they also have the potential, if somebody goes, "oh, Hey, there's a grease fitting, let me grease it." And then they ended up greasing it, and then we've got an issue down the road.

So let's just take care of that issue. And we're just going to replace it with a regular step bolt. This one is designed to work with the one and three-quarter inch double spring eye. This is just a single spring eye because of the type of suspension system we're putting on it here. But this is the correct size of bolt to get it installed. And you can see here that this is just a standard bolt. It doesn't have a sort of fitting, so this is designed to work with this type of bushing here. And it's going to prevent anybody from accidentally greasing that in the future. So we can go ahead and show you how to get these installed. Now they're really easy to install once you've got your old ones out of there. It is just a bolt that you get. So this nut here is actually the nut from the wet bolt, but it's the same thread pattern. If you need new nuts, you can get those also here at etrailer. So here's our bolt. You can see it's got a cerated flange on it there to keep it from rotating in the hanger. We've got our shoulder here, where it sits inside of our bushing. And the measurement of this bolt. This is a three-inch bolt, and that's from the bottom of the head there to the end of the threads. That's going to give us plenty of usable portion here for our spring's bushing to ride on. And we've got plenty of threads sticking out to properly secure our bolt. It's a 9/16" diameter shoulder. So to get it installed, we're just going to lift our spring into position. We're going to take the spring eye, and line it up in between our hanger. We'll then take our step bolt here. And we're just going to slide it on through there. Now it's not uncommon for it to be a little stiff. So we're just going to take a hammer, and just going to tap it the rest of the way. And we're not even hitting it that hard. It's kind of using it the way with the hammer. To tap it on in there. And then we'll secure it with a nut on the other side. We can now tighten down that nut. It is going to draw the bolt in some on the cerated edge, but we don't want to over-tighten our bolts. So after we put some pressure on it, we can then come back with our hammer, and tap it in the rest of the way. We'll then tighten down the nut. The nut that we've had on here is going to be an eighteen millimeter socket, and the head of the bolt will hold with a twenty-one millimeter wrench. So we just drawn that in. And then there's still a little bit of a gap there. So we're going to take our hammer. And just take a look at it there, it's nice and flat. So it's all the way driven in. Then we'll finish tightening it down. And then we can go back and torque it to the manufacturer specifications. So now that we've got this one installed here, if you had a traditional leaf spring with a double eye, you would just repeat that process for the one on the other side. We're installing a slipper box here, so we don't have an eye leaf over here. So we're just going to continue on with this installation. If you like the way our slipper set up is, or if you're interested about these, you can find out more about them here at etrailer. And that completes our look at the 9/16 step bolt for a 1 3/4 inch spring eye hanger..