Pop-up Front Tongue

Our pop-up camper was used when we got it. The front tongue jack handle was damaged, and the rotating plate was loose, bending away from the welded plate as the jack was cranked up. Also the tongue jack was on the left (looking at the tongue), and an anti-sway bar was on the right; this is an unconventional setup. I thought I would fix that by installing a new tongue jack and anti-sway bar. This project afforded me the opportunity to buy an angle grinder, and I'll admit that part of my undertaking had to do with cutting metal and making sparks!

First thing I had to do was remove the old components.

-The anti-sway bar, which was bent, was easily removed by unbolting it from the tongue.

-Once the anti-sway was off, I simply bolted the new bolt-on side-wind jack onto the trailer tongue. Pretty easy really. I chose a long-throw, side-wind jack with a foot.

-The swivel-mounted tongue jack was a bit more tricky. The swivel mount is two parts, one that does the swiveling, and one that is fixed. The fixed part is welded to the frame, but the swivel part needs to be removed before working on the welded plate. The swivel piece fits over a cylindrical protrusion from the welded piece, and they are held together using a big (and strong) spring clip. I wish I came up with an elegant way of removing this spring clip, but I didn't. Instead, I used a combination of prying, pinching, swearing, and another set of hands to get the clip off. Once off, the swivel part, which holds the jack mechanism, simply slides off the plate and thus off the tongue.

-To remove the welded plate, I got out an angle grinder. I used a cutting wheel to cut the the plate off at the welds, and then used a grinding wheel to flatten out the area where the welded plate used to be.

-I then primed and painted the area that I had just ground down. I used an outdoor spray paint. Those are my kids in the street making some sort of bike race track outlined in chalk. It's a quiet street. I laid down a few coats of paint, and then for good measure painted over some of the uglier parts of the tongue nearby.

-Once the paint dried, I installed the new anti-sway bar. Mark six holes, drill them out, then tap them with the self-tapping screws. Instructions on e-trailer are perfect. I greased up the ball on the anti-sway bar, and voila, a new, updated and hopefully more functional front tongue for the trailer.