Towing Trailer with Bad Brakes

[grimmysnr]

My buddy has a 16ft enclosed trailer that we use for taking the ATV's out on the weekend or occasional hauling around town. The trailer weights maybe 5 or 6 thousand pounds soaking wet. The problem is it has two bad calipers on the front two tires and the back two tires has either seized or bad calipers as well. Ultimately, the braking system on the trailer is completely unreliable. Considering the trailer is so light I am not really concerned with towing it with my 2010 2500HD. What I am concerned about is the brake controller. In this particular instance I would want to disable my brake controller so that the truck doesn't try to continually apply the brakes that do not exist and potentially cause more damage to the trailer. I am confident that my truck will stop this thing as all we haul is a few ATV's.

 

How do I disable the stock brake controller for this particular application?

 

Just to edit on to this. There are brakes on the trailer but the pads are shot and the calipers are shot. So the brakes do work in a sense but they apply unevenly and unreliably.

[MikeNH]

Pretty sure if you set the gain to zero it won't send current to the brakes. That said, towing that much trailer even with a HD truck and no brakes is beyond stupid. Get it fixed.

[nbscanuck]

Have you ever seen that tail wag the dog. Well you are about to. HD or not. Glad your in South Dakota, I wouldn't want to share the road with that rig.

[EcWrestlr]

Have you ever seen that tail wag the dog. Well you are about to. HD or not. Glad your in South Dakota, I wouldn't want to share the road with that rig.

 

 

Exactly! Thats a lot of weight with no brakes. Get the calipers and pads fixed and travel safely!

[grimmysnr]

This isn't a permanent solution and it is my buddies trailer who has been towing it fine with his Ram 3500. I did ask him today how much it weighed and I was overshooting a little since he told me it was actually about 3500 lbs. I think I was going off of fully weighted down numbers. In either case I don't tow this trailer and the circumstances differ greatly from just driving it around town. Thanks for the info and I will let him know to get his brakes fixed!

[TimmyG]

3500 plus a few quads @400 or more pounds its adds up fast, toss in a few guys and gear in the truck.

If anything you will wish u had the brakes if you have to panic stop, even if it just keeps the trailer behinde you, and not sliding around back there

 

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