UPDATED: We Are Homeless Once Again...After One Week Back In Our Trailer

UPDATE: I had the picture of the bad axle at the end of this article and some folks claimed they did not see it. This means those folks don't read to the end... so here is the picture of the bad axle just for them. In addition I made a short video and posted it as well, but you do have to scroll to the bottom to get the link. 

Sometimes it feels like one step forward and two steps back. We have moved our brand new trailer to three locations. In a big loop actually. We drove it from the dealer, back south to my in-laws driveway, where it sat for a few weeks. We loaded it up. Tested out many of the systems and then we moved it up north to the local Thousand Trails.

I am the official site parking driver and I had trouble backing it up a small incline into a site. It proved so challenging that the transmission overheated...what the? Note that this light weight trailer should not have caused ANY strain on our 1 ton DRW truck's transmission. So I asked if we could move down one site which was a straight flat back in. I told Hub that the trailer felt resistant to backing for some reason. Once parked, we of course forgot about it.

Today we had to head back to the dealer to get our last add on installed. Hub parked outside the dealership and when I told him to come on forward, I watched him start to move. Stop. Get out and look under the trailer. Hop back in and move up to me.

I asked what the deal was and he said it was resistant to moving. Hmmm. So he backed it a tiny bit and I watched the trailer shudder. It was a strange looking motion, not normal at all. We swapped places and I backed it to get in a better position to disconnect. Hub looked underneath and reported, that the axle was shot. 

We both went in and reported the news to our service manager who told us we needed to leave it to be repaired. He had to document it and send everything to the manufacturer (Lippert warrants the axles for 5 years). Of course an entire axle is a very large part to ship, so it is not something that will come quickly. I am not sure exactly when the full on broken axle happened, but boy am I glad Hub looked carefully to find the issue before driving it any further. Many bad things could have happened. I even wonder what we would have done had we looked and saw the damaged axle before we had left, would we have had to get it towed? Who knows.

So, guess what? YUP! We are back in our little room at my in-laws feeling a bit down because of our rotten luck:( Or good luck, depending on how you look at it.

The top picture is of what a good axle connection looks like, and below is the broken one. Note that the cushion the leaf springs sit on somehow rotated underneath? Yikes!

I made a quick video showing the actual axle... Video Length: 2 min. 52 sec.