MORryde X-Factor Crossmember for Standard Frame Hangers

Video Transcript for MORryde Standard Frame Hanger X-Factor Crossmember Review

Hey guys, welcome to etrailer and today we're gonna be taking a look at the MORryde X-Factor cross member for standard hangers. Trailer frames definitely aren't as strong as we'd like them to be. There tends to be quite a bit of bend in them, especially when you make sharp turns. You'll kind of see you'll flex a little bit side-to-side. So what this is going to do is it's going to strengthen from beam to beam. It's gonna give you a little bit extra support.

That way, when you do make those turns, you're not gonna see it start to flex up one way or the other. And it's just gonna give you overall more stability with your trailer, which is also gonna help all of your other components. So when you have better handling because your trailer frame isn't starting to lift up, you're gonna have more tires down on the ground. It's gonna get more surface contact and you're gonna get better handling overall with less wear on your front tires. For the installation, you will have to lift up your trailer.

You're gonna have to let the axles hang and then support them separately. So you'll definitely want to use some bottle jacks. That way, you can kind of move it up and down. With this specific one, it really isn't too hard 'cause you're only popping out one hanger bolt so you don't have to, it's not like you have to set up some giant thing to hold this in place. You're literally just holding it so that when you pop that hanger bolt out, it's not gonna fall down on you.

As far as placement goes, if you're only getting one cross member, then you'll wanna put it in the center of your tandem-axle trailer. If you end up getting two of 'em, you'll wanna put one in the center and then one at the rear, 'cause that's gonna need more help than the front wheel. This one is also going to be a fit for your CRE or SRE MORryde equalizers. So typically when you look at the MORryde ones, it's gonna have it right on the front, it'll say that's CRE or SRE. Basically what that means is just because this is sitting above the equalizer and it's going exactly where your wet bolt would go, they would hold your equalizer up.

It's gonna be compatible with those systems and it's also going to be compatible with a Correct Track system as well, if you have that on your hangers. We use a breaker bar on the head of my bolt and hold it in place while I pull the nut off. We wanna make sure that we don't have that head of that bolt spinning in there 'cause it has teeth on it. and that's gonna end up grounding out our hanger. Take it off from our nut side and once we have our nut off, we're gonna take our hammer and we'll pop this out. You do wanna make sure that you have your trailer supported, or your axle supported, before you go ahead and pop that out though, because then you're gonna have a loose hanger here and your leaf spring can fall down and won't be able to support its own weight. If you need to, if you can't get it out, you can also go ahead and take a little hole punch or something and just kind of pop that out. If you don't have one of those, go ahead and take a flathead screwdriver. I'm gonna first install our black bracket here. It's going to sit on the inside of that hanger just like this and we'll slip our wet bolt through. So we'll pull that up, push it back through. And since has a grease zerk fitting, we are not gonna be able to hammer on it directly. What I do is I have a socket that I set up on there and it's gonna sit around that grease zerk fitting. It'll allow me to tap it in the rest of the way and then the teeth that are on the head of that bolt bite into our hanger. Once that's fully flush, we'll go ahead and stick on our bracket. And then you're gonna have a round spacer, basically just a washer but a little bit thicker. We'll slip that on to our wet bolt and then we're gonna have a flange nut we're gonna stick on as well. We're not gonna go tight with that yet just because we want this a little bit loose so we can kind of maneuver it and get the other bolts in that we need, so just hand tight. And then you're gonna see these long brass bolts. You'll have these spacers that'll go over it and kind of protect the bolt from the outside, and then a strap. So what we're gonna do as we'll slip that bolt through, we'll have that cover on there, then the strap and then a nut. Let's get that started, then switch over to our other side. And while we're tightening these down now, we're gonna go ahead and just make sure that this stays level. Sometimes it'll kind of wanna lean to one way or the other. So as you tighten it down, keep an eye on that. I'll tighten these down just a bit. I'm not gonna go fully tight yet. I'm gonna get the hanger bolt in, but just snug that up. Makes it a little bit easier to kind of get it level with the hanger. You can also kind of just feel the bottom. All right, and tighten down our hanger bolt. This is just until it's kind of hand tight. Does have a torque setting, but at the same time, you still need this to be able to flow freely back and forth. If you pinch the hanger too much on the leaf spring, it's not gonna be able to fully do its job correctly. Can end up having some issues, be a little bit too stiff and end up damaging your leaf spring. Now that we have this all bolted up, we're gonna go ahead and just repeat the same process over on the other side. So each hanger is going to have a different size. This is gonna be an inner and an outer. Our outer one is gonna have those slots, the inner side is going to have just standard holes and basically what this is gonna do is, it's gonna slip over that and bolt together in those spots. And then on the ends it's gonna have three spots on each side to bolt into those brackets in our hangers. Now these are specific, on this side we do have our smaller bracket and on the other side we have our larger bracket. So we will need to put our larger one over on that side and our inner smaller one on this side. The hardware that we're gonna be using to attach our cross member to the brackets is gonna be these black bolts and these silver flange nuts. So we'll go ahead, I grab six of 'em and six of our flange nuts and we're just gonna set the cross member up into place. We'll stick some of these bolts in and we'll just hand tighten it for now. You're gonna wanna leave this loose, that way, when we go to connect the two pieces together, it's not gonna give us too much trouble. And then we'll just repeat this same process over with the other one, making sure that we put our outer one on top of this bar right here so that they sit together correctly. Now while we're putting this together, we're gonna have four bolts on each side. We wanna get the two outermost ones on each end. So for this, put this one up top. And then on our left side, for our other end, our outer one's gonna be right there, here. And then we can secure those with more flange nuts. And then repeat this over on the other side. Now that I've got all these on here just hand tight, we're gonna go ahead and tighten all of these down with our socket wrench and then we will go ahead and torque 'em all to spec. Now we that have all of our bolts torqued down, that will do it for our installation of the MORryde X-Factor cross member for standard hangers.