I'm going to be buying a car hauler soon to tow the firebird to and from the track. Do most of you guys who tow think you really need your trailer brakes? Single or both axles? A friend will be towing it for now with a '01 2500HD but I will be buying a F150 or 1500 in a year or so to pull it around.

 

trailer brakes are always nice. If you plan to pull w/ a f150 i would get them.

 

everyone i know has trailer brakes and an electronic brake controller installed on the tow vehicle as well.

 

I think for a smaller truck it's a good idea.

I've towed with a Lightning, my 99 Tahoe and rode in other trucks and I would not tow in my Tahoe without brakes. If you get an F150 I would install electric brakes.

 

I have a 24 foot open trailer now with one axle brakes. It makes a huge difference if the brakes don't work. I used a buddies trailer before, same size but two wheel brakes. I loved that thing. You might not notice it under light braking but if you have to throw the anchor out in a hurry. IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE.

Just my .02

Ken

 

I used my dad's f150 to tow me to the SBSO. The trailer has trailer brakes, but I didnt have the brake controller, so they didn't work. It sucked! Especially in the rain when we arrived in San Antonio. I would highly recommend trailer brakes.

 

i would only tow with trailor brakes. they are cheap and very efficient, esp with a controller in the cab. there is a HUGE difference unless you have a tranny breake - like in the allison and ford HD trannys.

 

I'm going to get trailer brakes then. sounds liek they are worth it. Thanks guys.

 

I tow w/o them and its fine but I am going to get em as my trailer has them but I have been to lazy to get the box for the truck...Oh well, it is a good idea Joe...

 

Same thing here but i towed Eric a buddy of mine (your cars twin) with my gfs truck no trailer brakes and cheap U-Haul trailer sucked in the rain. I had to get on the damn brakes a mile b4 i was suppose to stop

 

with my 1500 z71 pulling my car was a pain without the breaks and awsomoe with them, well for stoping anyway. with the f250 diesel i havent gotten around to installing the brake controler yet cause it stops fine with the monster truck breaks. but with a 1500 series truck you neeeeeeed them.

 

I would consider brakes on at least one axle an absolute neccessity. If you ever have to make an emergency stop, you'll know why

In fact, here in Florida, any trailer over 3000lbs (any open trailer with an F-body on it will go well over 3000lbs) is required to have brakes on at least one axle. It's a no-brainer, since it shouldn't cost but an additional $150 or so over no braking axles...

 

If you get pulled over with a trailer that has brakes and they are not connected you may face a pretty big ticket. Another thing to consider is how your insurance company will view an accident if your brakes are not connected.

Daren

 

The first time someone cuts in front of you or pulls out from a side street you will want electric brakes.

 

You've definately got me sold it on it guys. I'm getting trailer brakes for sure

 

My old trailer had single axle and the new one has dual axle brakes and I could tell the difference - they are a must. Plus if you buy a newer truck with the tow package it takes like 5 minutes to hook up a brake controller - not like the old days where you had to splice into the brake lines..

Most 16-18' open trailers are over 2000lbs with a full diamond plate floor, my old 18' with a full floor was 2100lbs. I have one of the lightest steel open trailers you can get and its still 1700lbs, I wanted a full floor but at 5000lbs with the car I was getting too close to the tow rating of the truck. Aluminum trailers are lighter but double or triple the price. Also make sure and buy a trailer designed for hauling a car, with at least one removeable fender. With a lot of utility turned car trailers you wont be able to open your doors and that sucks.

 

This is very interesting. I worked at an axle factory for about 10 years running the test lab. I have tested lots and lots of brakes, mobe and travel trailer, several brands. The law required them, but we never designed for more than the minimum and they did not work very well. They would help some, but none I ever tested could come close to matching the braking ability of the tow vehicle. And the controllers were pretty bad too. All that stuff must be better today. One of the biggest mistakes is the automatic controllers that did not require a connection to the hydraulics. They cannot work well because of the operating principle.

 

The newer electronic controllers do a pretty good job, they use different types of inertia sensing devices. The cheap controls just use the brake lights and apply the brakes over time and have one simple adjustment. The better ones use de-acceleration sensors and coputer logic to control the brakes. The one I have has two adjustments, one for low speed and one for higher speed and a 2 digit display of how much percentage of braking power is being used + it will display the numbers of the settings so you can cut the brakes back with an empty trailer and easily go back to loaded braking. Its not perfect but it does work very well, only time it screws up is if you are on a steep downhill and go to stop hard it tends to overreact. I wouldnt want to stop the whole mess in a hurry with them only from 70 but you could if you had too. Obviously the four small electric drum trailer brakes dont have the braking power like the hydraulic disks in the 5000lb truck towing it, but they help.

My first open trailer like 20 years ago sucked as far as the electric brakes went and it had the controller tied into the hydraulics, it wouldnt lock the brakes in a gravel parking lot and you could max the lever on the controller and you would barely feel it slow down on the highway. Next couple had surge brakes which are great in theory but never seemed to work right, not to mention you have no control over them. All my big enclosed trailers were electric except for a 45' 5th wheel chaparrel that had some goofy vacuum/air/hydraulic mess that never worked right and eventually converted it to electric.

 

One of the things that made me spring for the 3/4 ton truck (C2500 Suburban) over a regular Suburban was the upgraded brakes. I've towed my car with a no-brakes trailer - the 'burb did OK, but the ABS did kick in more frequently.

The other thing about the 3/4 ton truck was the upgraded transmission. 4L60E vs 4L80E. No brainer there. I don't know how Ford sets up their trucks tho.

And at somewhere around $75-125/axle for electric brakes installed, it's cheap enough... why not. I definitely notice them helping. I went with both axles getting brakes.

 

Yeah, they do help a bit, but they apparently still are a problem in terms of brake balance and such.

The old controllers were rather course. The KH one, IIRC, had a band that shorted out turns of the thick Nichrome wire resistance coil. They had a patent, so others used half a dozen pins that contacted the coil, which was even more coarse than the KH. The first decel sensitive one I saw used a weighted flap that would swing through an optocoupler and vary the freq of a 555 timer. It did not work much better than the mechanical ones as far as smoothness. Another problem is the gain in the brakes themselves. Depending on the magnet, the armature material, the lining material, and shoe design, you would sometimes have 50% of the braking power at the minimum amperate you could deliver. That felt good unless you were on gravel.

The surge brake seems like a good idea but it has a fatal flaw. It works by a lack of braking on the trailer. The tounge is articulated and has a master cylinder inserted. So you hit the brakes on the tow vehicle and the trailer pushes against the tow vehicle, through the master cylinder, which applies the trailer brakes. But, obviously applying the trailer brakes reduces the force on the master cylinder and thus the pressure to the trailer brakes, which reduces their effort. At some point the system balances, but it should be pretty obvious that you can never get very near having trailer braking that actually handles the weight of the trailer. You need a tow vehicle with good enough brakes to handle, say 80% of the trailer weight. If you run the system gain up trying to increase the effectiveness, they get jerkey, and in any case you can never approach full braking on the trailer (ie, the trailer brakes handling the weight of the trailer so no extra load is imposed on the tow vehicle) as that leaves zero force at the tongue to generate hydraulic pressure to drive the brakes.

The electronic ones can't sense inertia, but they can sense acceleration (or deceleration). That is how all the ones I have seen worked. However, they have the opposite flaw than the surge brake. In this case, trailer braking increases deceleration, which applies more trailer brakes, which produces more deceleration, ad nauseum. The only way they can work at all is if the system gain is low enough to prevent lockup, which again means that they can never handle a significant portion of the trailer weight.

I did design andd prototype an electronic controller that used a pressure transducer hooked into the tow vehicle hydraulics. It worked quite well, but we could never source an inexpensive enough transducer to make the thing viable in the marketplace. Today, with the silicon sensors, it could probably be done but might be a hard sell against the "clean installation" if the non-hydraulic connection controllers. I also designed and prototyped an electric disk brake that suffered the same problem - economics.

Bottom line back then was that you had better have a tow vehicle that had surplus brake capacity and drive carefully, leaving plenty of room to stop. It sounds like that is still true.