1998 1500 dodge ram sport, have electric brakes on the horse trailer that weighs 1800 and the horse 500 plus. the brakes failed last steep decline and only just came back enough to control but bloody scary, would I have manually put ram into third gear, I had overdrive off is an auto

 

Did you ride the brakes all the way down? Brakes will overheat and fail quickly. Put truck in 2nd and only snub brakes quickly to drop down 5 mph and then release pedal. If riding brakes too much downshift to 1st and slow your roll even more, if your are constanly on the brakes you are risking brake failure. Brakes go from working good to nothing at all in a split second and you can't get em back after they're hot.

 

thankyou for your advice, we had to ride the brakes as it was steep and very windy with no other way of slowing down, might go for a practice run before the horse goes on just in case, I wasn't sure if putting the ram into second would damage the gearbox, so thanks for your help....cheers carol

 

Sure it was the brakes and not the controller or bad wiring?

 

Downshifting won't damage the transmission. Just take it slow when descending a steep incline while towing a heavy load. Truckers follow that practice as you don't want to lug the engine.

 

I was taught to use the trailer brakes manually when going down a steep incline. Takes some of the load off the tow vehicle.

 

Yeah, but, very easy to smoke the trailer brakes too......

 

At some point, you have to assume that some people have some common sense. I decided to make that assumption.😁. Short pulse on the trailer, short pulse on the truck, repeat. The vast majority of trailers I haul are either small, so they have no brakes, are large and equipped with surge brakes. I do intend to install a brake controller at some point. My work truck, F-350 Super Duty with Powerstroke, is equipped for the trailers I have at work with electric brakes(3 total, a big enclosed and two dumps) as is the 2010 Ram I also use at work, I put the one in the ram, because at the time we didn't have the 350. Got a great deal on the Ford, but had to do a fly and drive to pick it up in the Midwest. 2012, crew cab, brand new 8 ft utility body, 48k. 24 grand.
May be headed to Georgia in a few weeks to pick up a new excavator. 500 to ship, I can do the trip for a couple hundred in fuel, plus, I will be halfway there for the weekend anyway( dock launch date is nearing...) So I volunteered to hit GA around 730 in the morning, load it up and haul it back. I will be in the Ford. 😒

 

people that don't tow all the time wouldn't know stuff like that. heck most people don't even know to adjust the brake controller for your load before taking off. i know an empty trailer usually requires a lot less trailer brakes to get the tires locking up than a trailer with a load on. i learned a lot more about this stuff when i started doing landscaping and we were adjusting the trailer brake controller multiple times a day depending on what was in the trailer. definitely a good thing to learn before hooking to a trailer with with electric brakes

 

you can go as fast as you want/can up a mountain, but if you're heavy you need to go slow down it. like 15-20mph or even less if you're really heavy/overloaded. you can go too slow anytime, but you can only go too fast once.

i think this sign would be valid for speeds you should go based on how you're loaded. 80k would be equal to fully loaded for your trucks rating.
this is the sign from deadmans pass in oregon, I84 west, near pendleton. there are similar signs for major mountain passes around here.