Never Get Locked Out Again.

dan — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:00:19 +0000

When it comes to security, the Airstream is as good as any trailer I have seen. There is a dead bolt built into the door and there is no picking the lock once you’ve lock the door. To lock the door, you just slide the door handle to the lock position and shut it behind you on your way out. That’s assuming you don’t forget the keys inside. As we start spending more time on the road, I am concerned that one day it is gonna happen. I am gonna step out of the trailer and out of habit, slide that lock across the door and shut it behind me with the keys inside. Imagine being locked out of your house with your 2 year old inside who doesn’t know how to let herself out. Except your house might be in the middle of the desert, deep in a national park or along the long stretches of empty beaches on the Oregon coast.

So getting a secure hide-a-key is one of my projects for the Airstream. If you are a surfer, you’d know all about dilemma of where to stash your car keys when you are out in the water. Some of the newer cars have the remote door entry built-in to the key so taking it into the water with you is out of the question. I started research for hide-a-key products originally for the purpose of safely storing my keys while I am surfing so having a 25 foot trailer attached to the rear of my car didn’t orignally seem like a big deal. One of the first hide-a-key products I have is the HitchSafe Key Vault.

HitchSafe Key Vault

This product is great for someone with a 2 inch hitch receiver on the vehicle. It is weather proof and all metal construction that should keep whatever in there dry and secure. The only problem is it doesn’t work so well when you need your hitch receiver to do a little more work than to just hold some keys and a 20 dollar emergency bill. Like towing a 6000 lb. Airstream.

Master lock makes a fairly simple key storage box much like the one you may see on the door knob of a home for sale. It resembles a large padlock and is also weather proof and made of metal with rubber outer shell.

Master Lock Access Key Storage Box

This key lock is nice and also the least expensive product of the lot but it is not ideal for a moving vehicle. You might find a strut under your car to attached this too but I’d be worried of it banging against the undercarriage constantly while the car is moving.

Another product Master Lock makes apparently is design just for someone just like me. It is a combination lock key safe that also works as the hitch pin for your hitch receiver.

Master Lock Receiver Hitch Safe

Receiver Hitch Safe keeps the security box securely fastened to the hitch without effecting the ability to tow a trailer. It might not be the most elegant solution as it is not technically a ‘hide-a-key’, it is made of heavy duty steel and the same weather-proof combination lock as in the previous 2 options. Here is a video of how the Receiver Hitch Safe works from the good folks at etrailer.com

Video from eTrailer.com

So which one did we go with for our hide-a-key and where do we keep it? Well, if I told you then that would not be a very hidden key now would it! (Is there a hint in there somewhere?) I think all three of these products do a great job of keeping your spare keys safe and mostly hidden (except for the last one). It’s just a matter of your application and your preference on what works for you. Here’s some links and prices on where you can get one of your own.

Product Links:

over and out,

dan

Let’s get hitched!

dan — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:56:20 +0000

I did some research before buying the Airstream about what kind of hitch to use to drag it around the country. Since I have only ever towed trailers that I can push around with my hands, the 7000 lb beast is a big change. With an 800 lb tongue weight, it is also 300 lbs more than what my class 3 hitch is rated for. Bad news right? Well, that’s where the weight distribution systems come in. By using a weight distributing system, my class 3 hitch can increase its capacity to accommodate up to 1000 lbs of tongue weight and 10,000 lbs of trailer weight. Magic!

Equalizer

Reese

Hensley Arrow

These hitches essentially use leverage created by solid metal bars that extend from the rear of the hitch to even the weight across all 4 wheels of the vehicle. There are people who will go on and on about how these work but I like to think of it as a wheel barrel. The handles of the wheel barrel are the metal bars and it takes the weight off of the back and moves it to the front. If you want to find out more, do some searches on the wide wide world of web. There are people who will tell you a lot more about it than I am willing to bore you to tears with.

The other part of the hitch equation is sway control. Imagine yourself driving your car and trailer down the road. You are just trying to keep it between those stupid lines when a big 18 wheeler zooms by and you get a little spooked. Your little jerk to the wheel creates a wave of swaying effects that travels all the way back to the hitch and by the time it gets to your trailer, it is amplified to a monster tsunami.

The 3 basic types of sway control are friction (Equalizer as shown above), cam (Reese) or the system patented by Hensley Arrow. By far, Hensley Arrow is the most expensive version of sway control and is arguable the best/reliable method of controlling trailer sway. Equalizer and Reese basically use friction and mechanical force to dampen the effects of sway. Hensley Arrow on the other hand uses an engineering concept to transfer the center of pivot farther forward in the tow vehicle to eliminate trailer sway.

Here is a more detailed explanation I found online about how it works. Also a YouTube video by some MIT engineering student explaining it with LEGOs.

Are you crying yet? I know I am. This stuff can bore you to death but I have no choice but to figure out what to get before we go out on any extended trips. I was impressed after having done some research of the Hensley Arrow so I gave them a little call to see about ordering one. Since they are factory order only company with no other distribution, you would imagine their are able to cut a lot of costs by not paying commission to the dealers. You would think that. You would. But you’d be wrong! They want $3,000 for that sucker!!!! That is 6 times the price of the other versions.

I’ve seen them in person and it is an impressive piece of engineering. Very heavy duty and well made. But at the end of the day, it is just a few hunks of metal. They offered to send me a video that demonstrates how it works for free so I figured, sure, why not. The least they can do is to spend a couple bucks and send me a DVD so I can check it out. Aside from the fact that the video was most likely released on betamax during its initial distribution, it uses all kinds of fear-inducing tactics to scare the wallet out of your pants to get you to buy one of these. I couldn’t deal with it any more. It was too much.

We ended up going with the Equalizer system for a few reasons. One is that it is a simple system with the least number of parts so the points of failure is reduced to a minimum. The other is that it has much higher ground clearance. The most important of all, it was a lot cheaper than the Hensley Arrow. How much cheaper? $3,000. That’s because dealership offered to throw it in for free when we bought the trailer . OK, fine, that is probably the only reason we chose it.

Here is Aaron from the Airstream dealership showing us how to use the hitch.

So far so good. Although we’ve only used it to tow about 250 miles home, it has worked well so far. And that’s all the way through LA traffic which is probably one of the worst places to tow a trailer. We are going to be towing it through some winding mountain roads this weekend as well as on an Interstate freeway with lots of big rigs. Wish us luck!

over and out,
dan

Mali Mish » hitch

Never Get Locked Out Again.

Let’s get hitched!