We broke both rear spring hangers on our Cyclone 3800 pulling into Elkhart on Sunday, Oct. 4th. We had an appt. at the factory service center for a sidewall crack repair, we planned to hang around Elkhart and gauge the progress to see if we could return home with our trailer at the end of the week but that plan went south so we made the 1000 mile trek back home empty.
Our last fuel stop was a 100 miles out, in Kokomo, IN, I always walk the trailer at stops and nothing was wrong at this point. I’m not sure where along the way this failure happened as there was no indication that something was wrong. I didn’t notice something was not right until we were turning off of CR7 onto CR6, which is right by the service center, when we turned left I only noticed 2 wheels in my mirror on the driver side! I thought, OMG, We have lost a wheel/tire somewhere since Kokomo! Turning right onto Dexter Drive I saw 3 wheels on the passenger side, the service center is right down the street so I pulled it around back where you leave them. When I got out I noticed the rear axle was offset, a quick look and both rear spring hangers had broken off and shifted the axles and leaf springs and also damaged the wheel well trim. I parked it, winterized, took pictures and left a note on the front cap and went to the hotel.
The Heartland service writer assigned to us emailed me Monday morning saying they got the note and would get back to me once they could get a better look at it. Lippert has been contacted and will be there on the 15th to inspect and do an upgrade hanger retrofit, not sure what that is yet, then it sounds like Dexter will be called in to address axles and leaf springs. Heartland says they will not move the trailer until this is resolved, so then it will go in for the repair we were there for and they will address any other issues caused by the spring hanger failure at that time.
i have been inspecting these but always thought that the welds holding the spring hanger to the frame is where the failures were occurring, that part is still attached as you can see in the attached pics. I was looking on the forum and ran across an older thread that I actually commented on that shows recommended spring hanger reinforcement from Dexter.
https://heartlandowners.org/showthread.php/72063-Spring-hangers-failed/page2?highlight=Hanger (post 15) Honestly, I totally forgot about this reinforcement and never did it and because of the inspections I was doing led me to believe that we were one of the lucky ones, this will be happening when we get the trailer back.
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