Curt Clevis Hook with Spring Loaded Safety Latch - 5/8" - 65,000 lbs

Video Transcript for Curt Clevis Hook with Spring Loaded Safety Latch Review

AJ: What's up, everybody It's AJ with etrailer.com. Today we're going to be checking out some CURT clevis hooks. These are going to be a great for attaching to the side of your trailer if you're tying down something on a flatbed, or for safety chains on a gooseneck, like we're going to show you here today. The spring-loaded latch helps it stay connected at all times, that way it's not going to pop out there while you're going down the road. Let's take a closer look at it.Look at them all next to each other, you can see the big size difference. We have the 5/8 one, which is our big, heavy duty one.

Now the 5/8, actually, is talking about the clevis pin here at the end and its diameter, so it's going to fit through those bigger chains for our heavier duty applications, like maybe a crane. So if it's lifting a load up like that, you're more likely to go with this big heavy duty chain. It's a little bit of overkill for safety chains like we're going to do today.Speaking of that, this is the one we're going to use today. It comes in at 7/16, because the diameter of the clevis pin fits through our chain we're using today for our safety chains. So it's going to be a good hook to use right here with our safety chain loops, and we'll show you how to install it in a second.

Our other size would be 1/2, and it's a good, in-between our heavy duty and then what we're going to use on the safety chains today. I've already removed the hook from this side, and this is the one we're going to install our new hook on. I just wanted to show you the old one and how the pin's wrapped around the clevis pin here at the end.The Cotter pin, you just kind of bend it around to keep that pin in place. So we took pliers and we just bent those straight to pull this Cotter pin out. Going to our new Cotter pin, that's in there straight for now, but we're going to bend it when we install it.

So we're going to just use some pliers, pull that out, take the clevis pin out, put it in between the hook here, install our clevis pin back in there, and then drop our Cotter pin back in. With it installed, now I will bend the Cotter pin backwards to keep it in place. There you go. So now you can see, you can't pull it right back out.I'm going to come down to our safety chain loops and just put our hook in there. You can see it's not going anywhere.

Let's put some pressure on this latch and see what happens. See me pulling on it, trying to catch the edge of it That's good, because it takes a little bit to push it back to even get it to spring back, and that way, if the safety chain loop does catch or anything, it didn't seem like it was easy pulling it out or pushing it around, so you don't have to worry about that at all. The clevis hook we're keeping today has a weight rating of 40,000 pounds. Now, obviously that's going to change the bigger and the more heavy duty the hooks get, but they are all a grade 80 steel with zinc plating, so you know that they're going to hold up.Clearly there's a bunch of different variables on which hook you we're going to go with and what will work for you, it really depends on what you're going to be hauling and using it for. But with whatever one you go with, I think I really like the latch system on the hooks because I don't have to worry about when I'm going down the road. If the hook was just in there, and sure you can tighten it down, it'll stay in place if you get it nice and tight, but there's always that chance in my head while I'm driving down the road that's like, "Oh, I'm going to hit a bump. It's going to come undone." With these spring-loaded latches, it's not going to happen. It's always going to stay secured around, whenever you have it secured around, like this loop or on the side of a trailer, or just the chain itself, it's going to stay connected. So I really like that part. I think that does it for our look at the CURT clevis hooks. Hope this helped.