We have five trailers to tow around our armada of small boats, and when we hit the road we carry a roadside repair kit, with one of the most important items being a trailer jack to change out flat tires or bad wheel bearings. For many years we focused on jacking up the trailer frame, which meant a variety of jacks ranging from a repurposed car jack, a 3-ton bottle jack, a wooden 2×6, to a heavy floor jack. Recently we came across a better solution, the Springfield Quick Change Jack, which has no moving parts and lets the towing vehicle do the lifting. The recess in the jack is set on the trailer axle and towing the trailer a few inches provides the lift. The jack has a capacity of 4,000 lbs.
Photographs by the authors
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Another Toy to carry in the car.
A few years ago I needed a low-profile scissor jack to lift my 17’ sailboat a little off the trailer in order to make a coating repair. It occurred to me then that I had no jack for the trailer if I needed one. I went to my local junk yard and sorted through 5 or 6 cars until I found the perfect jack. There are many many jacks in excellent condition at very reasonable prices and in a wide variety of sizes and configurations available throughout the country ready to be repurposed.
This has been around a long time. I had one in the ’70s; don’t know what happened to it. I haven’t pulled a trailer in a good many years.
After buying many of the jacks mentioned in the article, I found my truck jack from my Nissan Frontier is fast and works fine for all three of my trailers. The others were a waste of money, heavy, and cumbersome.