Landing Gear Problem!

[BirdingRVer]

My landing gear is only extended about 3 inches but, it will not go up with weight of the trailer on the landing gear either with the motor or manually. Sometimes when I try to raise it with the manual crank the rod just spins, other times it refuses to budge. The landing gear will retract both with the motor and manually and will extend to a point where it starts to take the weight of the trailer. The landing gear also makes a clunk, clunk, clunk sound when retracting or extending.

Of course it is Sunday and no one is open. Anyone have any ideas.

From Prince George British Columbia
Grant aka BirdingRVer

[Mrs. CountryGuy]

Not for getting you home, well, there are ways to get her up, but you have to be very careful to not twist and bend things.

We just had this this summer, clunking and all, Lippert replaced all the parts TWICE, and the fix that worked, was to add a second motor for the other landing leg.

It was not a cheap fix.

What kind of caught our attention is that when we lift Tana now, with TWO new motors, we can really hear BOTH of them working. Al and I both came to the conlusion, that if we can hear 2 working like that, that 1 must have been touch and go to raise Tana for a very very long time. Now, we are surprised that one motor did the work for as long as it did. We have had the clunk clunk clunk for over 3 years. NOT every time we raised Tana.

We kinda feel that it happened the most when the front end needed to go up extra high to get level. That puts a lot of extra stress on the motor, our observations, BUT OF COURSE!!!!

I posted about this about 3 weeks ago, a search may bring up the thread.

Now, you could try this, it did work for us, but, it took a LONG time to get Tana lifted high enough to get her on the hitch. Al would push the toggle switch for a few seconds at a time, he got where he could judge when that thing was gonna CLUNK, and he stopped JUST before the clunk, rest a few seconds, then do another few seconds of up, rest, up, rest, up, you get the idea. The idea was to not let it CLUNK. By the way, the clunk is the clutch slipping.

Good luck, hope our insight will help ya some.

[H. John Kohl]

I believe you have the same problem I had. The clicking or clunking is one of the symptoms. The replacement gears were $60 for each side. My slide show has the company phone number. Make sure your landing legs are the same type. Mine would raise and lower with weight but would not raise with no weight. I had to replace the top gears on one side. Here is a photo link to the repair..
If you have to raise your trailer now get a pair of bottle jacks (preferably 6 ton each and put them under the frame just behind the jack lets. That will let you put it on or off the truck. If hooking to the truck make sure the wheels are chocked real tight so the front does not fall off the jacks when backing into it.

As a note, You can open the propane compartment, remove the tank and lift the flat cap for the square tube. Clean some of the grease and see if the gears are slipping. See the pictures.

Let me know if you need more help. I can call on the cell.
Good luck and let us know what you find.

[BirdingRVer]

I got the Landing Gear fixed today it turned out that the horizontal gear had 4 teeth stripped on the passenger side landing jack. No idea why. Luckily they had replacement gears in stock.

While testing the new gear they were running the landing gear up and down. They blew 2 fuses always when rising the rig. If they put the rig on a forklift to take the weight off and they could extend the legs much further than I every had. I have never been able to run the motor more than about 20 seconds without blowing a fuse.

They say that the motor is under engineered for a trailer with so much pin weight.

Mrs. CountryGuy - They say it would be about $1500 to re-engineer for two motors. How does that sound to you?

[Mrs. CountryGuy]

WE went directly to Lippert in Goshen,

They replaced the original motor, and the gear box and the legs, and everything. Our gears were NOT stripped or broken in the legs.

Then they added a second motor, of course, that meant they had to change the corresponding leg gear box, to work with a second motor.

Had to run wires, cut out part of the wall behind propane bottle, and a bunch of other stuff I am sure. They had to put in a new switch and took out that bar that goes between the legs.

$1500 sounds a bit high, but if they give you TWO new motors not toooo bad. Parts alone for just a second motor and leg/gear box and all that was involved in adding the second motor was over $650.00.

If you find my other post you will see where I related that this second motor fix is done for a lot of larger, heavier units. The motor is rated to lift 5000 pounds, and when we were weighed by Lippert we were less than 300 pounds from the max.