When we went to Trout Lake in May, I got the trailer parked and looked at the wheel and realized it had an interesting pattern of dirt, where it looked like something had spun out from the middle. I felt it when we got there (as I always do) and it was not running hot, so I figured the bearing was ok. I asked a friend to take a look and he suggested my grease cap may have come loose, allowing the grease to spin out.

I finally got around to checking it out since we were back home. His diagnosis appeared to be correct, as the little rubber grease cap on the end of my Dexter EZ Lube was deformed, and the inside of the hubcap was full of grease that had flown out of it. Not that much grease, really, just enough to make a mess.

Luckily a pack of those little rubber guys is like $6 on Amazon, so I bought some, just got them in today, and it fit perfectly. The plus side of this is I ended up watching some videos on the EZ Lube axle maintenance and I’m pretty sure I can do it myself next time. I usually take it up to my tire guys in Battle Ground, but it looks pretty easy.

Anyway, that’s just the sort of little maintenance things that crop up when you have an old trailer. While I was fiddling with it I added a water hammer arrestor to the main waterline to see if I can correct some of the water hammer I seem to have caused by replacing some of the old copper pipe with slightly larger diameter PEX. Someday I would like to do the whole thing in PEX, but I don’t think I will be pulling out perfectly good copper pipe just for fun anytime soon!