Checking Electric Brakes

Here's a tip I used recently to verify that brakes on both wheels of my 2619 were connected electrically (the brakes seemed fairly weak, so I thought it might be that one brake was working but the other wasn't, due to a loose wire or something):

I used an ohm meter to measure the resistance between the electric brake terminal and the ground terminal on the TM's 7-way trailer plug. According to the Dexter Axle manual, resistance should be 3.2 ohms for each wheel brake, so it should read around 1.6 ohm (.8 ohm if you have 4 wheels) if the wiring is perfectly resistance-free. Of course it isn't, so my reading came out to be 1.7 ohm - but that's still close enough. You can look up the trailer plug wiring diagram online to see where to hook up the leads. If the reading was 3.2 ohms, I'd know one of the wheel brakes wasn't electrically connected anymore.

This might be a good check before a long trip or after a long time in storage (up here, the rats love to chew on wiring). You still need to test your brake stopping power (in my case, the weak brakes were due to the brakes being out of adjustment), but this can let you electrically verify they are connected.