Boat trailer bearing care.

Many a time you will see a boat, caravan or just any kind of trailer on the side of the road with its wheel off due to bearing failure.
With other types rather then boat trailers, it may be over loading or usually dry bearings from over heating by braking boiling the grease out that may make them fail, but with a boat trailer it is nearly always the bearings have been exposed to water.
Fresh water is a bit slower at rusting out bearings and of course salt water exposure is the fastest.
The cheapest ways to avoid aol this are to take your wheel bearings a part and check and if need be replace the old ones if there are scores on the bearings cones.
If you do not want to do this just run your vehicle at the usual speeds with the trailer in question behind the vehicle and drive as per usual for 15 to 30 minutes then stop safely and test the bearing housing/hub for heat with your hands.
If this area is quite hot to touch, in fact to hot to leave your hand on it, then your bearings are most likely about to fail!
The heat trial is now done and you are lucky, the bearing housing did not overly heat up, now all you need to do is purchase bearing buddies or make a cheaper way to carry out what these pics that follow show you how to sort of make your own bearing buddies.

1.Purchase basic grease nipples from somewhere like super cheap auto spares or repco or the best is a nut and bolt shop, those types of places or a trailer repair place. Also find a thin nut to fit the grease nipples thread


Drill hole the right size for grease nipple thread.


Use a bolt, in my case I used a socket extension to to flatten the metal either side of the hole to make the hole smaller to enable the grease nipel to screw in.


Hole altered.


Wrap electrical tape around thread to help seal when screwed in, just one layer.


Screw in grease nipple.


Put nut on the inside.


Finished.


Fill with grease.


Place over bearing area and tap in with a hammer.


The last boat I had with this that I made and put on the trailer as my dad showed me, I used grease gun to top up after each time i used the trailer and the bearings were fine 17 years later when I sold it.