Wheeling

I was lucky when I bought the trailer as it came with 3 wheels. All of them were original U-haul wheels with the nubs to mount baby moon hubcaps. (though I wasn't lucky enough to score a set of the U-haul stamped baby moons)  The rims were in rough shape so I painted them black as the easiest way to get them with some uniform look. When I was looking to put the second spare tire mount on my tongue, I needed to get a 4th wheel. Fortunately, you can order them from U-haul truck parts Ebay shop (here).

The wheels are a nice clean white which match the new paint job well. (The newer wheels do not have the bumps to hold baby moon hubcaps though. So if you're looking for that style you'll need to find original wheels.) I opted to buy 2 new wheels and make them my main wheels and use the originals on the spare tires. I took the wheels and tires to my tire shop and had them swap them around. A new spare tire went on one of the old black rims after the tires from them had been moved to the new white rims. When I got back home I put the new white wheels on the camper and mounted the black rims on the 2 spare mounts. Having 2 spares for our 4000 mile journey was a huge comfort, especially since we'd be leaving the US on this trip.

Just for information, I use Carlisle Radial Trail (the existing tires were RH and the new spare is an HD) tires for the camper. Greenball is another highly recommended brand. Don't just buy the cheapest brand that you would normally throw on a small utility trailer that you don't use everyday. While you may not be using the camper everyday, you want something more dependable due to the number of miles you will drive when you are using it and the weight, heat impacts and bounce.  After all, it's better to not have to use your spare. For more info on tires see my earlier post.

The old lugs and lug nuts were very rusty. The old lug nuts were open-faced which allowed more rust issues on the lugs than a closed-faced lug nut. I bought some new chrome 12x1.5 close-faced lug nuts to put with my shiny new wheels. Next I tackled the rusty lugs with a wire brush to clean them up. (You can see my video on removing rust from the lugs if you need to do this.)

I like the new look. It's very clean and fresh looking. I'm currently on the search for chrome center caps to install to finish the look. I'll update when I find some that fit. Everything held up well on our big trip this summer and thankfully we didn't need to even use one of the spares.