RV Driving Tips: Regularly Check Your Brakes and Tires

Whether you're driving a motor home or pulling a trailer. It's important that you periodically check your brakes, your hubs and your tires, whenever you stop for fuel. You can use a infrared thermometer like this one here You can get these at any automotive parts stores most of your home improvement stores. And it's just a simple infrared that I'm going to push down here, get a meter reading on it. And what I wanna do is every time I stop for fuel I wanna make sure I get out and check the hub check the actual bearing the brake drum for heat. Check the tires as well. Just kinda get a sense of where they're running at and do it in the middle of the day. I don't wanna do it in the morning because I'll have sun on one side of the vehicle or late afternoon. That'll kinda give me a false reading but you know, check it. If you've got an 80 degree ambient temperature and I'm running up in the 90s maybe close to a 100, I probably okay. The other thing I wanna make sure is that I checked both sides. Now, if I have one side that's running hotter than the other side and it's in the middle of the day then it's telling me that I either have something going on with my brakes, with my bearings or I might have too much weight on one side of the vehicle versus the other. I might have to shift some of that weight in the compartments around. It's also good with trailers. I can kinda tell too, if my brakes are set up a little hot, you'll see it. When you're going down the road. If you've got them set a little higher on that, they're gonna wear a lot more. You're going to get a lot more heat out of it. Now this is a good tool to have. Although I use this one here, this is a I R Sonic measure by Ryobi and I got it at home improvement store. Just about any of those that sell the Ryobi brand tools and that type of stuff we'll have this the reason I got this one, it does two things. It not only gives me the heat and let me get on the mode here. It'll show me temperature and either the metric, fahrenheit or centigrade. And then this one will also do distance and I'm gonna put it here. You'll see that I can actually take it up to about 50 feet and see how many feet and inches that I have. And so when I pull into a camp ground if I don't know the branch that's hanging over the camp ground area is low enough to do damage. I can just simply hit this deal here and it's gonna give me an infrared. And it's gonna give me a distance where we see 12 feet three inches from the ceiling that we have in here. I'd wanna put it on the ground. And it would tell me exactly where it's at. If I wanna know how far the camp ground site is say I got a 37 foot motor home and I only have 34 feet in the camp ground. I can hit the tree or picnic table or something. The other thing can do is can I bring my slide room out? If I've got the three foot slide room I could just kind of hit where that post is at quickly. So it's a nice kind of piece to have. It does not only the heat to make sure you're running cooler in your axles, but it does a distance. So you might not do some damage when you get into the campground.