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Hi there, trailer owners. Today, we're going to be taking a look at Dexter's bronze bushing replacements. And this is what our new bronze bushing looks like once you've got it driven in. Bronze bushings will protect your leaf spring from anywhere, because this is the designed wear point. A bushing is designed to take up that wear. By having our bronze bushing in here, when we go down the road, and our leaf spring is moving up and down, and our bolts are pivoting inside of it where it connects to our equalizers here, over time it's going to wear this bushing out and that's exactly what we want.
We want the bushing to wear out, not our leaf spring.To help minimize and slow down the effects of wear on our bronze bushing, we can ensure that we have a wet bolt installed, and this is going to allow you to grease inside the bushing so we don't have the metal on metal contact. We've got a nice lubrication in there, and that's going to drastically extend the life of our bronze bushing there.Compared to our plastic bushings like you see here, the bronze bushings have the potential for a greater life span if properly maintained and greased. The nice thing about the plastic bushings is that you never have grease these, and you don't want to grease them. They're self lubricating. If you're looking for a maintenance-free option, I would highly recommend the plastic bushings for you.
If you're constantly keeping up on maintenance on your trailer and you're really diligent about it, then I would recommend the bronze bushings, because they had the potential to last longer if properly maintained.We'll begin our installation by getting our tires out of the way. We're just working on the back axle for this one. We don't need to remove our front, but depending on what all you're doing, you may need to remove yours as well. When we're moving your wheels, you want to make sure you got your trailer supported on the frame by a jack stand. You can use just a regular floor jack to lift it up.Once you've got all your tires out of the way for the area you're going to be working in, we can then start removing the bolts for wherever we have damaged bushings.
To replace the bushings, you just need to remove the hardware first. For this particular set up here, the bolts are pressed into these shackles on the head of the bolt side, so we're going to remove both of these nuts and take the two out at the same time.If you're going to be replacing your bushings with bronze bushings, you also need to replace your bolts with wet bolts that have a grease fitting on them so you can grease those bronze bushings. We're going to take our bolts off. The bolt sizes can vary depending on your particular trailer. For ours, we're going to be using a 7/8.
And you may or may not need to hold the backside of the bolt when removing these. They are supposed to be stuck inside of here, but over time they do rust, and things wear out, and they may not be. It's not a bad idea to put a wrench on the other side and hold it.If we place our floor jacks underneath the U-bolt on our axle, we can relieve a little bit of pressure on it to make it easier to get the bolts to come out. Now what I like to do to get them out is I to just thread the nuts back on there just a little bit, and then tap them out with the hammer. Putting the nuts on it just helps prevent you from damaging your threads when you're tapping on them.We can just slide it out there. You can see on our equalizer we've got a brand new bushing in there, but on our trailer here we've got an old one. And this old one here is so worn out that I can actually just push it out. Now, if you are unable to just slide out your worn out bushing like this, one of the best things to use to take them out as you can use an old bolt. If we use another bolt that's slightly smaller and just place a flat washer on it, we've got a nice flat solid surface to drive it in. And we know since we're hitting all the way around, we're not going to ding up the outside of our bushings here with our hammers as we're driving it in.We're just going to hold it in place, and we're just going to tap it in with our hammer. A lot of times these tap in pretty easily, but every now and then you do got to hit them pretty hard depending upon the rustic condition of your leaf springs. We can now take our new wet bolts and we can slide them into our shackles. Now, if your old shackles are all worn out and the holes are all worn out, then I would recom