The corner steadies installed on our caravan are essential to stabilise our home on the road. You wouldn’t want the floor of your house to rock when you walked around inside, and the same goes for a caravan.
The steadies we chose have many benefits, but we have noticed some limitations related to their design, operation and maintenance.
Design
The A-Van has crank-style stabilisers rated for 350kg at four corners, with scissor/screw-type jacks.
This design is said to be more stable than the common post types, and it does seem to work well enough to keep everything still inside our small van.
However, due to the curved design of the foot we’ve noticed that the contact area with the ground is actually fairly small. More often than not we need to place a block of wood jammed under each of the feet to provide more stability.
While on the road we’ve noticed that some caravans have fitted add on’s such as “Big Feet” that enable greater contact area with the ground.
Operation
To operate the steadies, a steel winder needs to be carefully inserted into the top of each and turned on the right angle.
This can be awkward and a little dirty because you need to bend down to ground level. It’s the one job Court hates doing, so she usually tries to palm it off to Drew, who has a bit more muscle power to wind it down.
Once you’ve managed to release the pressure it’s no problem, but this process is probably more time consuming and clumsy than it needs to be.
Some caravaners are using attachments that enable their corner steadies to be operated with battery drills. To us, this appears much more efficient.
Maintenance
Dragging the van along dusty roads has impacted the operation of the corner steadies; the red dust and dirt gets stuck inside and a regular spray of WD40 is needed to get them winding again.
While our corner steadies do a pretty good job at stabilising our caravan, there are a few things that we are not overly happy with. If we decide to upgrade the caravan’s corner steadies or buy a new caravan in the future, the design, operation and maintenance of corner steadies would definitely influence our purchase.
Drew and Court are a Melbourne couple who are travelling around Australia for the next 10 months. They’ll be writing about their experiences for Without a Hitch giving us the real story of life on the road.
Next week Drew and Court will be discussing their experences and the importance of soloar pannels when traveling off the grid.
