The Importance of Trailer Safety Checks

News travels fast at the Lake View Inn. It was a rainy afternoon when Dan “Big Z” Ziolkowski—who, unlike the rest of our gang, is active on social media—interrupted a Brewers broadcast on the bar’s big screen with a breaking story.

“Whoa! Look at these photos Goofy just posted,” Big Z exclaimed from the end of the bar. “His trailer fell apart on the interstate!”

He passed his phone down the bar, and we all got a good look. There was a displaced axle, a leaf spring snapped in two, tires shredded. In other words, the trailer boater’s worst nightmare. The poster was our friend Malcolm “Goofy” Sohm, who was towing his pontoon up from North Carolina for ToonFest in Oshkosh. I called him immediately.

“Buddy, we are safe on the side of the road. The trailer went bang, and all I saw was tire smoke in the rearview,” Goofy said. “I about crapped my pants. We were going 70. I’m still shaking.”

So what happened?

“It looks like the spring hanger for the rear axle either broke or the weld to the frame failed,” Goofy said. “Then the spring dropped down and maybe snagged on the pavement and snapped in two. Next, the axle angled forward into the other tire, and it was just mayhem from there.”

The trailer, according to Goofy, is less than a year old. This reminded me of an incident at a boat test in Florida many years ago. We’d just launched a bass boat, and as I walked past the empty trailer, I looked down and noticed—just by luck—that one of the U-bolts holding an axle to the spring was missing. On the other U-bolt, the nuts were backed way off. I reached down and could turn those nuts with my fingers. The U-bolt nuts on the other spring were also loose enough to turn by hand. When I called over the rep from the boat company, he turned pale.

“I just towed this boat and trailer 80 miles per hour from South Carolina, and then through Orlando traffic,” he said. “This could have been a disaster.”

We found a wrench and started checking fasteners. Every nut on the spring-to-axle assembly had clearly not been torqued down. Someone completed the basic assembly but then forgot to come back and tighten it up. Ever since that day, I have gone around and checked every bolt on my own trailers.

“But how could you check for a weld that’s about to fail?” Big Z asked. “Are you going to Magnaflux the entire trailer and look for cracks?”

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We would like to count on the trailer manufacturer to have such fear of liability and litigation that it would make very certain every weld was done expertly and then inspected. Or make an investment in robotic welders, the kind that don’t have hangovers. In reality, it’s up to boat owners to never take anything for granted when it comes to any boat trailers.

Goofy drove two hours home and got another trailer. The recovery specialist got his broken trailer on dollies and towed it to their shop, then used a crane truck to lift the boat off that trailer and onto the replacement. Eight hours later, Goofy was back on the road to ToonFest. More good news: The Brewers beat the Cubs.

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