Curt S-Hook with Wire Keeper for Safety Chains and Cables - 7/16" - 5,000 lbs

Video Transcript for Curt Safety Chains and Cables S-Hook with Wire Keeper Review

Hi there safety conscious haulers. Today, we're gonna be taking a look at CURT's S-Hooks with the latch. These are available in either a 3/8" diameter, 7/16" diameter, or 17/32" diameter. That's important for determining the appropriate size to fit through either your safety cable loop and your safety chain. If you're using on a trailer, your safety chains, depending on how thick the diameters of those and the weight ratings are also going to correspond with those sizes. For the 3/8", it's going to have a 2000 pound weight rating, for the 7/16" it'll be 5000 pounds.

and for the 17/32", it'll be 7,600 pounds. And you can see here, we've got S-Hooks installed on safety chains on a pop up camper back here. So they're not exclusive to just flat tow setups. This one here is just a standard one that doesn't have a security latch. So this is a good candidate for an upgrade for one that does have that latch.

So that way they know that they're going to be safe, no matter what, whether they're hitting those bumps down the road, this isn't going to be able to just pop off of there, it's going to stay in place. Just make sure you pick the appropriate diameter and weight for your particular trailer to make sure it'll slide through your chain links and that you've got enough capacity here for the event you do have a catastrophic disconnect. So here you can see why we're going to be replacing our S-Hook here. This is the one we've currently got on here, and you can see it comes off really easily. This particular S-Hook you can notice it's got a couple of holes in it there at the bottom.

Those two holes are where the latch mechanism used to be. It got a little corroded and worn out here, and then it's actually just fallen off down the road. A customer no longer has it. The hook does still function as an S-Hook, but we've lost that extra security of the latching function now. And on the back of these motorhomes, there's so much motorhome that hangs off back behind the rear axle, when you hit bumps and stuff like that, there's a lot of up and down motion and force.

And in most cases, the cables don't move around too much because they're coiled cables. They got some tension on them and stuff like that, that holds them in place. All those major forces going on, it could leave it in a position where it could throw the hook up and it could detach. It's very unlikely, but adding an, that latch in there that it used to have is going to help ensure it stays in place. So we have replacement S-Hooks here with latches that you can get from etrailer.com. We've got them in a variety of sizes, so you can make sure you get the appropriate one with the right weight and also the right diameter to fit through your particular safety cable or safety chain, depending if you're installing this in a flat tow setup, or if you're installing this on a trailer. Our release mechanism here, you can see where it slides into those two holes. So it's pretty much identical to the one that was on there before it's going to give us the same functionality. So now we're just going to show you how to get this old one off of here and then how to get the new one installed. So we've gone ahead and brought it inside. We've attached it to our vice here. You could try to spread this apart, however, this is some pretty thick metal. It's extremely difficult to get it clamped tight enough in there to be able to get this spread apart, to slide your cable out. So in most cases, it easier to take your cutoff wheel and just cut this off of here. Now we've got to cut pretty much all the way through. You can just take it off of there and our cable should slide out of there. I have to pop it out of the vice. When you do pop it out of the vice, just cut this, it's going to be really hot. So don't touch that little piece there. So you might have to grab a pair of pliers just to work it off of there. There we go. Now we can go ahead and install our new one. This is simply just going to slide in place just like that. And then we can crimp it down in our vice here. And we just kind of squeezed it until we know it's closed. We'll then just going to loosen it up some. It will likely spread open some. So just want to check to see where you're at. That looks still looks pretty good, no way that that's going to come off of there. So we've now got this attached and replaced. We're ready to go put it back into service on our flat tow set up. And that completes our look at CURT's S-Hooks with safety latch..