Dexter Axle Torflex Lift Kit Installation - 2018 Forest River Rockwood Mini Lite Travel Trailer

Products Featured in this Video

Torflex Lift Kit - Tandem Axle - 2-5/8" Lift

499 reviews

Code: K71-707-02

Retail: $320.54

Price:  $284.62

• Trailer Leaf Spring Suspension
• Alignment and Lift Kits
• Boat Trailer
• Camper
• Car Hauler
• Snowmobile Trailer
• Utility Trailer

• Tandem Axle
• Dexter

Lift kit raises your trailer frame by 2-5/8". Kit includes spacers and mounting hardware for tandem axle applications. Compatible with #10 Torflex axles with 2,300 to 4,000-lb capacities.

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How to Install the Dexter Axle Torflex Lift Kit on a 2018 Forest River Rockwood Mini Lite Travel Tr

Hi there, Forest River owners. Today on your 2018 Forest River Rockwood Mini Lite, we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install Dexter's Torflex lift kit. And this is what our lift kit looks like when it's installed. I've got the wheels off so that you can see these spacers in place here between our axle and the frame. That's where it goes. And it's going to provide a two and five-eighths inch lift above our factory suspension from what we had before.

This is going to take our trailer and it's going to lift it up by that amount, which is going to give us greater clearance to the ground. So when we're hauling our trailer, we don't have to worry about as much issues with scraping on the ground. Particularly if we have leveling jacks and things like that, that are hanging down below.And in some cases, depending on your camp site, where you park it, you may be so low to the ground in that particular spot that you can't even use your landing gear properly to level out your trailer because they just don't quite meet where they need to. By lifting it up, we get more room to work with on our landing gear so we can get those legs swung out and everything set up properly. And it can also help out with getting it properly, set up with your truck.

If your trucks lifted up higher than your trailer, then you can haul it uneven. And you want to try to haul it as even as possible to have the proper load and tongue weight on your truck's hitch at the back. So something like this is going to lift it up and provide that for you.This gets designed to work with Dexter's #10 axles. There are also lift kits available for Dexter's #9 axles here at etrailer.com. Where on our particular application here, we're using the #10.

And you can see it comes with all the hardware that we need. Brand new hardware for attaching both our axle to our bracket, as well as attaching our bracket to our trailer.One thing you want to keep in mind when performing this installation is that you are increasing the distance between your axle and your trailer here by about this much. And depending on your brakes that you have installed, whether they are electric or hydraulic, you may need to extend the wires or the hydraulic lines in order for the system to work properly with your trailer. On the one that we installed today, we did have to add a few inches to the wiring in order to lower it down and be able to have proper travel of our suspension without damaging the wires that go to our electric brakes.And when it comes to the installation, it's considerably easier than many other style of lift kits for different style of suspension. With this style here, with the Torklift axles, it's as simple as lifting your trailer up to where it hangs off the ground.

You want to give yourself a considerable gap between the ground and your tires when you got it up to ensure that once you get your kit installed, you can get your wheels back on if you did take those off. I would recommend at least four inches between that when lifting it up. But once you got to lift it up, it's as simple as placing your jacket underneath, lowering down one side, installing the spacer, and then moving onto the next one. I'd recommend finishing up this axle, doing the other side, and then moving on to your next one. Now that we've covered some of the features of our lift kit here, why don't you follow along with me and we'll show you how to get it installedWe'll begin our installation by taking our trailer and we need to lift it up off the ground. We need at least four inches of distance between the ground and the bottom of our tire once we have it lifted up so that way when we put our spacers in, we can still have enough room for our tires to not be touching on the ground so we can get everything back together. We've got ours on a lift here, lifting it up, but if you're doing this at home, you could easily do this with jack stands and a jack. You just want to take your time and be careful and lift it up. If you have an assistant it's best to have somebody help you to can lift it up evenly doing either the front, back, side to side at a time just taking your time and going around evenly.Once you've got it fully supported, I did take the wheels off so you can better see, but the wheels don't necessarily have to come off. You can get a little bit more room to work, but we can get everything we need to, as it's back here a little bit further in. So we're going to go ahead and roll under now and show you where those bolts are. So now that we're underneath, here's our axle here. You can see the two bolts that attach the axle to the frame of the trailer. Our spacer is going to be attaching to the similar location right here.So we're going to need to take these loose so we can drop the axle down, but we don't want to drop it down just yet. We want to start by getting our hardware loose, and then we're just going to leave the bolts in there with the nut just a few threads on. So that way it's going to hold it up. It'll make things much easier that way if we do that now. For our particular trailer here, they're going to be a fifteen-sixteenths size for both the nut and the bolt to get those off.So we're just going to start by cracking it loose. And if you've got power tools and stuff, a lot of times you can, once you get it cracked loose you can use those. Or if you have a set of ratcheting tools, those also work very well.Now again, we don't want to take this all the way off. If your bolt starts to spin on the other side, just use your other wrench to hold it. And it's important that we don't take these all the way out yet because we're going to need to support the axles by either a jack or jack stands before we lower it down because it is quite heavy. So that's why we're just kind of doing our preparation, getting our hardware loose, just to make things a little bit easier when we're going to have to start moving our jack or jack stands around.So now we've got it about right there. That's fine for now. We're going to go ahead and loosen up the one on the other side, the same way, just to where we're pretty close to the end there. And then we're going to loosen up all of the other bolts. So there's two just on the other side of our axle, just like this. And then since this is a tandem axle, we have another axle. So there's going to be two sets of bolts on each side of that axle as well.And the reason why we're waiting to take our time as well is due to the brakes that's on our trailer. If we look just over here, you can see our wires they already don't have a whole lot of slack in them. So that's why we're wanting to just kind of take our time with this, loosen these bolts out and assess the situation. Since we see that those are pretty short, in order for our suspension to have proper travel once we lower it down, we are going to have to extend these wires a bit so that way they don't become damaged.So now that we've got them loose all the way around, we're going to go ahead and get our jack in place underneath the axle here. Just kind of get it to where it just touches it for now just so we've got a little bit of support on it. Then we're going to need to go to our wires on the side. And if you check yours and you've got plenty of slack, then you may not need to cut the wires, but on ours, they're a little bit too taut. So we're going to have to cut them to lower it down. So here are our wires right here. We're going to go ahead and cut it right there in the middle because we want to be able to strip on each side.So we're just going to cut both of them. And the great thing about these brake wires is that they don't really matter which one goes to where. So when we hook them back up, it really doesn't matter. So now that we've got those cut, our hardware that we've got loose, we're just going to finish taking that off. Since we had loosened it all the way up just to the very end there, we can just finish taking these out by hand now. So we're just going to remove these two bolts, get the nuts off of there. And once we've got these loose, the only thing holding this axle up is our jack that we've got under it. So now it's still held up on the other side over there, our passenger side. So we don't have to worry about that side. And we only want to do one side at a time when we're doing this.So we've got those out now. So now we're just going to slowly lower it down. And we just need enough space for our component to fit. So that should be pretty good right there. We're just going to do a little dry test fit here. So here is our new component and it's going to sit like this with the opening towards the outside. If we see the holes here at the bottom of our bracket, it lines up with the holes in our axle. So that's how it's going to attach to the axle. And then these holes here in the back of it are going to line up where the bolts that we had just removed were.We're going to be replacing all the hardware. You do get brand new hardware in your kit. You'll get washers and nuts. If you look at the nut, you see how it's got those indentions in it there. That's going to be the outside because it's a locking nut. You're not going to really be able to start it on that side. So you want to start it like that. And then since the locking nut it's going to stay tight once we tighten it down.So now we can take our bracket and it's just going to sit in between our axle and our frame. You can see that the bottom holes here line up with the holes in our axle and the ones here in the back here are going to line up with the holes that are actually used to be attached to. We want to make sure this opening is facing towards the outside so we're looking right in this cavity. We can then start securing it. We're going to go ahead and slide our bolt through the hole. On the opposite side we're going to place a washer. And then we can follow that up with one of the lock nuts. Once we get this side installed, we're going to go ahead and put the same hardware combination in on the other hole on the other side of this bracket.So now that they're loosely installed. We want this bracket to be up against the bottom of our beam here. So we're just going to use our jack to lift it up. Just trying to get rid of that gap there. We don't want to jack it up too hard because we don't want to bend our axle. We're just wanting to have it just so it's up against it. That's good enough right there. So now that we've got it there, we can go ahead and tighten these down because it's going to be harder to tighten this hardware down. Once we put the hardware in down here, it's going to interfere with getting any socket or wrench on this bolt. So it's just best that we do it. Now we can now go back and tighten up our hardware. This is going to be the same size as the bolts that we had taken off before fifteen-sixteenths.And this is where if you did take the wheels off, it can be a little bit easier. If you're using power tools, you can get those in there a little bit better. And I recommend torquing these bolts now, just because again, it's going to be hard to get any tool on this once we put the other bolt and washer and stuff in here. And the bolt might want to spin on you so you're going to definitely going to want to be able to put something on it to hold it if you need to. And then we're going to torque it to the specifications found in our instructions.So now we're going to get our lower bolts in. So we're going to just lower our axle down just a little bit. And that's just going to give us a little bit of movement and some Slack so we can get everything lined up with our bottom bolts we want to put a washer on both sides of our bolt. So we're going to have one on our bolt like that. We're going to drop it in there, move our axle over till it lines up, drop it through to the other side. On the bottom then, we're going to place another washer and one of the lock nuts.And now that we get this one started, we can go ahead and do the same thing on the other side over here. It's just going to drop down through and once again, washer and lock nut on the bottom. And now that these are both loosely installed, we can go ahead and tighten and torque these down. Your jack this point could come out of the way if you need it to, if it's blocking your tools and stuff. Since we've got our hardware loosely installed, it's not going to fall down or anything like that. And these are also fifteen-sixteenth socket and wrench.And now we're just going to reconnect these. Now it depends on the wires you got here. Since we've got so many wires on this one side, normally I just cut all this mess off and crimp it back together. But there's so many wires here, our regular butt connectors aren't going to do that. So we're just going to extend it from this point here. So we're going to strip back each end of the wires that we had cut. Just going to twist these. And we are going to be using heat shrink butt connectors. You can get those here at etrailer.com. We've chosen the heat shrink because this is outside our vehicle. It's going to be exposed to the elements. And when we shrink it down, it seals up our connections here, ensuring a long-lasting corrosion-free connection.Slide it on. Crimp it on the one side. And the issue is you can already see here, it would not have been long enough. So we're going to need some additional wire. You don't need a whole lot as you can see. So we're just going to get an idea of how much wire we're going to need. We didn't need to extend it much. We only moved it down a few inches. So a few inches is all we really need. So we're just going to cut us off a small portion. We know that the other wire that we're extending is going to need about the same length. So we might as well make them match and use the wire we just cut to measure up another piece.And if you wanted to, since they're all roughly going to need about the same length, you could cut two for each wheel and have yourself a set of these lengths already prepared. So we're going to strip these back. Now we're going to slide it into our butt connector, crimp it down. Grab another butt connector, slide it onto our little extension here, crimp it down. And then the other end is going to connect back to the wire. And again, with these breaks, it just needs power and ground to it. And it doesn't matter which wire goes into the magnet inside these breaks get that power ground, so just pick one of them. It doesn't matter. If you happen to have crossed the wires over here, it's still going to work just like it did before.And then I'm just going to do the same thing with this one here. You see, I put the buck connectors on this one. If you wanted to do the preparation, you could have them all cut with buck connectors, crimped on each end. That way when you go to the next wheel, you've already got your extensions prepped. They're just going to slide on, crimp onto your existing wire and then reconnect it back to the existing wire on your brakes. Check to make sure that all of our crimps held. Everything looks good there. And then we'll use a heat gun to shrink down our butt connectors.Now that we've got everything tightened and torqued on this side and all of our wires reconnected, this side here is complete. So we're going to go over to the other side of our axle. We're going to perform the exact same procedures on that side to get our bracket installed. And then we're going to move on to the axle behind it. And again, just repeat those same procedures. Now that we've got all of them installed all the way around, at this point we can just reinstall our wheels if we had removed them and then we can get our trailer back on the ground, hook it back up and hit the road.And that completes our installation of Dexter's Torflex lift kit on our 2018 Forest River Rockwood Mini Lite.