It’s been a year since I installed my first set of Wobbl-Stopprs from Torklift International, and they’ve helped to provide a lot of good nights of sleep, but because they were some of the very first units released onto the market, the fit and finish of the units hasn’t held up too well to the Oregon elements.
They still work just like they did out of the box, but have developed a little rust through Oregon’s never ending rain.
Also, since the time that I originally installed these, I went from having a Single Rear Wheeled truck to a dual rear wheeled pickup, which meant that as they were now, I had to use a couple 9/16” wrenches to loosen the clamp rings and pivot the Wobbl-Stopprs out of the way to load and unload the camper from the truck (my set didn’t originally come with pivot pieces).
So, I contacted Torklift to inquire about getting a set of pivots, figuring I’d clean the Wobbl-Stopprs up and repaint them in the spring.
They said, “Sure no problem!” and sent me another entire set! 
Thank you? Wow!
So, I got my new set of Wobbl-Stopprs, and unpacked them and was pleased to see that they had undergone some improvements over my original set of Wobbl-Stopprs.
The connection point where it joins to the camper has improved, instead of a single drilled hole through the tab, there’s now a recessed lip that the cotter pin slides over, making it a lot easier to get the pin in place.
And the jack leg anchor has definitely changed, a whole lot easier to install now, simply hand bolt it all together, carry it over, undo the back bolt briefly, swing one ear up and slide around the jack and bolt it up tight.
Old securing method, if you revisit my original Wobbl-Stopprs installation post from February of last year, you can see me installing this little clamp rings with a pair of channel lock pliers to squeeze them down.
One thing I definitely liked was they packaged a better set of screws with the jacks this time. Originally, they came with rounded headed screws that didn’t come close to filling up the holes in the tab plates, leaving the only things to keep the tab plates from moving around being the double-sided tape on the back of the tab plate and friction (I ended up using tapered head screws like these in my installation instead of the round heads).
The linking arms that actually join the camper’s jack legs to the tub under went some changes as well, though I’m not quite happy with the taper cut behind the point where the securing knob tightens down.
If you look closely you can see how having that cut causes the two sections to arch a little bit at the point where the screw threads tighten down. The camper is still just as stable, and I suspect the change came as a cost savings move as you can simply cut one after the other off a section of tubing stock with little waste.
Here’s the new wobbl-stoppr in place.
And here it is in the folded up position.
Sadly, the new wobbl-stopprs also didn’t come with any felt pads like the old ones to keep them from rubbing against the jack tubes, so mitigated this as best as I could by moving the velcro strap up.
Now, yer probably wondering, what did I do with the old Wobbl-Stopprs?
Well, I’m a Redneck, and you don’t waste something that’s still working, so I reinstalled them pointing a different direction to get rid of the front to rear wiggle the camper still had some of after the addition of the swing out brackets (a problem that didn’t exist when I was still a single-rear-wheeled truck.
Coming from the back of the jack legs now, the old brackets are far enough out of the way that they won’t interfere with the truck fenders passing as I load up.
Worst case, if it looks like there still might be a tad bit of conflict, I can simply slide the top sections of the wobbl-stopprs off temporarily so that the knobs are out of the way.
So, now, one year later, my camper is twice as stable as before and even in wind storms, the only way I can tell it’s blowing hard by the sound the wind makes as it passes the camper by.
No comments:
Post a Comment