Roadmaster Tow Bar Cleaner - 22 oz Spray Bottle

Video Transcript for Roadmaster Tow Bar Cleaner Review

Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today, we're gonna be checking out the Roadmaster tow bar cleaner. So we get a ton of questions from people asking about tow bar maintenance. Is it necessary Is there any maintenance to be done in the first place And so on, and like any piece of mechanical type equipment, maintenance is gonna be recommended It's no different than say a vehicle, for example. If you neglect it, it's gonna show. And properly maintaining a tow bar, it's really going to extend the life of it and the usability of it.

It's gonna work the way you want it to and the way it should. I mean, we've seen many, many times where these are neglected. You know what I mean They take a beating. These tow bars do a lot of work. They sit outside.

They're in elements and so on. Get a lot of miles on them. And time and time again, we've seen some tow bars get neglected and what happens, particularly, the mechanisms are just really hard to operate. So like, if you have a non-binding type tow bar, these levers can really get hung up and you really have to fight them. But more times, what we see is the arms, the part, these arms go in and out of the tow bar.

And what happens is this just get caked up with grease and dirt and road grime and everything else. And they make it super hard to work them in and out. And everything is sticky and all that dirt and stuff in there is gonna end up tearing up the seals inside of the tow bar and just being a big pain really at the end of the day. So a lot of times, you can replace some of the internal components and stuff like that in there. But a lot of times, they're almost as too far gone.

A lot more work than what it's worth, and you ended up with a new tow bar. So you can avoid that by just spending a little bit of extra time, a little bit of downtime, maybe once or twice a year, maintenance your tow bar. And that way, you're gonna be able to rely on it and it will be able to function like it was designed to. So whenever you are ready to maintenance and service your tow bar, the cleaner is gonna be only one aspect of it. You're gonna get it nice and clean, but then what this cleaner is gonna do, it's gonna take away all the lubrication properties and everything else. So that's where this is gonna come into play. This is the Roadmaster heavy duty silicone RV lube. And just like the tow bar cleaner, this is specially formulated for tow bars. And it's important that you use something that is specialized for the tow bar. This is kind of a specialized piece of equipment. And just like anything else, if you had a really nice car, you're not gonna use a product that the manufacturer don't recommend in it. Same goes with the tow bar. So you wanna make sure to use the right stuff and that way, everything's gonna work flawlessly and you'll have some confidence in it. As far as the bottle goes, I was kinda wondering how much of this is it gonna take to do a one cleaning, and not much. Actually, this stuff goes a long way. I mean, one bottle should get you covered for quite some time, quite a few cleanings. It's really strong, actually. And I was kinda surprised by that. I mean, it works really well, especially since it's non-toxic and biodegradable. Usually, you just don't get those type of results, at least from my prior experience with some of them. They feel like they're just a little more watered down and that's not the case with this. Like I said, a couple of sprays, it goes a long way. And so you can grab a bottle of this and chances are pretty good. It's gonna last you quite some time. One of the questions that kinda came to our minds was, can this be used with other brands of tow bars And it's hard to say, I really can't speak for every single one out there. So what I would recommend doing is just checking with your tow bars instructions, and however they recommend to clean and maintain it, just follow that process and be on the safe side. But with that said, if you're someone who plans on storing your tow bar outside in the off season, or really just in general, say if you leave it on the back of your motorhome, once this is cleaned and lubricated, if you just wanna go that extra step, what you can do is grab a bag. This is just a storage bag. And what this will do is when your tow bar is all folded up, you can put this over it and just really help keep the weather off it and kinda go that extra mile to keep things operating as they should. But with that said, if you wanna stick around and see this actually working and how to clean the tow bar, we'll go ahead and do that now. Again, I'm gonna be doing that in conjunction with our lubricant. And keep in mind, every tow bar might be a little bit different, the process on how to do it. We have the Falcon All-Terrain. So I just followed those steps, but generally speaking, probably gonna be very similar. So if you wanna hang around, we'll go ahead and do that together now. There is a recommended way on how to clean and lubricate your tow bar. So let's go ahead and just kinda run through this together. So I have our tow bar cleaner here. Just give it a shake to kinda mix things up. And what I'm gonna do first is just kinda spray the tow bar down, give it a good coating, and I'm just spraying it on everything, and we'll just give it a good wipe down to kinda get things started here. If it's real dirty, you can probably let this soak for a minute or two and let things loosen up a little bit. Ours isn't too terrible, so I think we can get away with just spraying it down. And we're gonna grab a cloth here and just get things wipe down. And this is actually working pretty good. I was really curious to see how well this would work, not putting a ton of effort into it, and it's coming pretty clean. Granted, there's gonna be a few spots that are just really tough on you and some blemishes and stuff, but not a huge deal here. So once you have the tow bar kinda just cleaned off and wiped down, if you rotate it and look at the back of the arm here, there's gonna be a rubber cap on each arm and we need to pop these out. So I already did this one and all you're gonna do is just take a screwdriver and carefully kinda just pry that out and set it to the side. Kinda tilt the tow bar up and pull the arm out to lock it down. And what we're gonna do is spray in this area here, and what's gonna happen is, is this cleaner, it's gonna leak down into the internal part here in that cap that we removed will allow stuff to get flushed out of the bottle. So we'll just this really spray this good. I'm gonna kinda cover this whole piece here. And what you can do is just work this arm in and out and you can see just by kinda doing that one time, a little more dirt is accumulating and it's picking up the dirt and kinda pushing everything, pushing everything out of a tow bar. So after a few times, I'm probably just gonna wipe this clean and just continue to repeat this process until we start to pull the arm up and we have really no dirt left. It looks like we're getting pretty close here. The stuff works pretty good, actually. I think I can get away with doing this one more time. And once that's done, I'll do the other arm. So once you're done with the arms, we can clean the locking mechanisms. And what you're gonna do is just spray a bunch of this cleaner into the mechanism. Don't be shy, really get this worked in there. We'll do this one while we're at it here. And then, once we get all this cleaner down in there, what we can do is lift the tow bar back up and you can hold up on one of the arms and just kinda work this mechanism. All right, and when you're doing that, that's gonna free all that dirt and gunk up and that liquid will take it and eventually drop it down where that liquid was coming out eventually. Probably, won't get a ton coming out of there 'cause it's gonna take nearly as much as the arms did, but that's how it's gonna work. So that one feels pretty good. Go ahead and do this one as well, work just back and forth, really get everything broken up. Then what I'm gonna do is just bring our arm back down. That'll hopefully push anything in that cylinder down and out of the tow bar. And I'm just gonna keep it like this for a moment and let gravity do its thing. After you let your tow bar is set for awhile and let it get all dry. What we're gonna do is just go ahead and take the caps here and carefully, just put these back in. They can be a little tight, so kinda have to carefully work them in and find that sweet spot. But now that both ends are sealed up, we can move on and relubricate the tow bar. To lubricate the tow bar, I'm using our silicone RV lube, and this is pretty straightforward here. We're just gonna spray down all of our moving parts. So I just spread the tow bar across here. And like I said, pretty straightforward. Anything that pivots or moves, we'll go ahead and give a shot of our lube. And not a bad idea just to kinda actually move it around and really get that silicone and to all of these components. So that one feels pretty good. I'll probably do here is move on to our arms and everything else here. So with these, kinda the same deal, gonna spray down into here and just move this in and out. Just continue around our tow bar to all of our components here. Get into the lock mechanisms and everywhere else. You're really not gonna hurt anything. So don't be shy with this. So this also works for your base plate pins. Now we don't have a Roadmaster base plate, but same concept. And whenever you clean these, and what it's gonna do is help protect it from corrosion and just make it easier to operate. These are new, so they're pretty smooth right now, but what you wanna do is make sure they're clean and essentially the same deal here. By spraying on the lubricant, what it's gonna do is create a little barrier there and that's gonna help protect it from corrosion and things like that. So honestly, now that I'm thinking about it, it's probably a really good thing we're doing this with brand new pins, that way they're protected. And we're not gonna have to try to fight them in the future and do this down the road. So every now and again, probably good to do, but doing it now when they're new will ensure they stay, just like new. After you hit these, let them dry for a second. This stuff dries really, really fast. Matter of fact, it looks like it's dry right now. Let's just go ahead and make sure they operate smoothly, which they do. Now that we have everything cleaned and lubricated properly, we're ready to hook up and hit the road. Or we do recommend doing this before the off season. That way, you got everything clean, lube, ready to go for next year. Once you take your motorhome and everything else out of storage. You're gonna have some confidence knowing that your tow bar will be ready to roll..