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Hello. I'm Greg from Bennington Marine. Today, we're going to take and show you how to hook up your vehicle to the trailer and get it prepared to go down the road.
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So as we get prepared to hook up the vehicle to the trailer. One thing we do want to make sure we do, we want to make sure we have the proper hitch ball on the vehicle that matches up with our trailer on right on top of the ball. You'll see it has the size etched right into it. This one's two and five sixteenths and that is also what we need for our trailer.
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We're going to be hooking up to. On the very front part of the tongue of the trailer. You're going to notice it has a ID. It tells you right here. It's a two and five, six inch ball. That's what is required for this trailer here. Some are two inch. There's different sizes. So you want to make sure you look at that to make things a little bit easier.
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It's always best you can get your tow vehicle pretty much in alignment with the trailer. So when you're backing up, it's just a little bit easier. Most newer vehicles do have these little television screens that show you how close you are to the hitch. Let's pop out and see how we did. Well, as you can see here, I'm still a little bit short, so I'm going to need to do is just jump back in the vehicle and back it up a little bit further.
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Our goal is to basically get this hitch just partial over the top of the ball. So when when the hitch on the trailer goes down, it slides up over top of the ball. So we're going to try it again here.
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Sometimes it takes a couple of tries. This is perfect. This is where we want it. So what we want to do is we want to make sure this hitch falls over top of the ball going forward.
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And that's going to make sure that it gets on there. See how it just dropped right over the the ball. Once it gets down and the jack comes loose, we can go ahead just disengage the trailer, Jack. Move it out of our way.
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Now that we've got the hitch secured over top of the ball, we're ready to go ahead and start latching things down. So we'll bring down the coupler latch, make sure that's secure. There is actually a locking pin. So we want to make sure we put that through there. Once that's in, that will not allow this a coupler to come loose as you're traveling down the road. We are going to go ahead and hook up our safety cables.
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In this case, some of them have chains. This one has cables so get those secured tightly. Those are secure. And as far as Couplers, this one here, this trailer has what's called surge brakes on it. So there's hydraulic fluid that will help you slow the trailer down from pushing on the vehicle. So basically, when you're coming down the road, you want to stop or slow down instead of the weight of the boat pushing on your vehicle.
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This cup will actually push in, moving the fluid back to the brakes. It'll keep the weight of the the boat from pushing on the vehicle. Now there's some trailers that don't have this and there's also some trailers that have electric brakes. The electric brakes will go through the light harness. As you see here. This will plug right in your vehicle.
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So some some vehicles are just a regular flat harness. Some require require a round harness to go into the vehicle. This is an adapter plug you can buy your local marina. Also, they make them where it's just even shorter. So it would just be the the plug with just the wiring pieces that you see there. You wouldn't have the extension piece between. I like the extension piece.
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It just gives you a little bit more room when you're turning. So we'll get this hooked up. And that is directional. So in this vehicle, you'll see the tab has to go down to the bottom that's secured tight there so now we just want to make sure we've got our cape safety chains and cables hooked up tight latches completely tight.
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We've got the safety pin in our light wire harnesses all hooked up. So we're ready on this end. Now, we just want to go ahead, make sure we have the boat secure. So we have what's called a safety chain. So we're going to get that hooked up first. Then we're going to go ahead and put our strap right in through the eyelet.
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And you're going to notice the strap goes underneath this metal bracket. What that's going to do is, as you see when I tighten, it's going to make that the boat pull down forward and down. At the same time, we want to make sure it's secured to the trailer that way. So, see how it, pulls it down. And then what we're going to do is we on this trailer, we actually have tie down ratchet straps.
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So we're just going to go ahead and give that secured out a little bit tighter seal that took slack out of there. So we have more on actually each corner on this trailer, which is really nice. The ratchet straps in the back as nice as well. Again, you just click it until it's tight and that way again, it's secured to go travel down the road.
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Also, while we're making sure the boat secured the trailer, this is a great time to make sure our lights our running lights are working on the trailer as well. You'll see here we have our running lights or tail lights here. Everything's working that we we're safe to go down the highway. For more boating tips, visit us at Bennington.Marine.com.
