As expected, the new master cylinder arrived today and I have just finished a quick test fit to make sure everything lined up. 100% success! Sadly, when I came out this morning, the shock absorber had leaked a bunch of the fluid so it looks like that part will need to be replaced.

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The first part of my planned winter trailer maintenance was to check the status of the wheel bearings and dig in to the braking system to see what needed to be replaced/serviced.

For more information on how surge brakes work, check out this eHow article.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the brake system is 100% non-operational, there is no brake fluid in the system, all but one of the brake shoes came off when I removed the drums and the master cylinder is seized up from years of sitting and more likely, lack of maintenance.

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A few months back, we (my wife) decided that we no longer wanted to sleep in tents on the ground. I was originally against any sort of towing with our van, as it’s tow ratings aren’t super high, however after some research and a few parts purchases (trans cooler, hitch, wiring…), the van was ready to tow a smaller tent trailer.

We didn’t want to spend a ton of money and didn’t mind doing a bit of work. After seeing several trailers we decided to venture a bit further from home and ended up purchasing a 1975 Lionel LP85 tent trailer. It originally appeared to be in better shape than we have come to find out, however the basics of the trailer are fine and it fit the budget.

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I finally found a bit of time and motivation to re-vamp the site. With a few projects I’d like to document and provide info for other people in the same boat, this was the perfect chance to do so. Please bare with me as I’m sure I’ll change a ton of stuff over the next while as I become more familiar with wordpress and it’s features/plugins.