Thank you to Camping World for sponsoring this post and the Service Center at Camping World of Baxter for getting our fish house axles back into tip-top shape!
The lake is finally making ice ice, baby and that means fish house season is nearly here! We’ve officially winterized our RV, the Peppermint Patty, and got our fish house (still to be named) out of storage. I am counting down the days until our family can go ice fishing while ice camping.
If you’re new to ice fishing in a hard sided fish house or an ice fishing RV, check out this article I wrote for Camping World on what to look for in the perfect fishing RV. Camping World has many new and used fish houses to choose from just in time for the ice fishing season.
With each new season comes a to-do list for maintaining an RV. The same goes for fish houses. One major not-so-fun task is keeping the rust under control by maintaining the fish house axles.
Here in Minnesota, our wintertime roads are famous for salt, pot holes and debris. That’s why it wasn’t surprising when our fish house axle hubs, also known as pivots, rusted up and locked up last winter (much like our first fish house) making it extremely annoying to use the fish house. Rust gets in between the spindle and hub from the axle which causes the axle to lock up and prevents it from raising and lowering off the ice freely.
This situation is frustrating because it’s time consuming, conditions are typically very cold and we are stuck on the frozen lake unless we happen to have the right tools and a ton of patience. It’s even more of a challenge when your kiddos are along for the ice fishing trip.
Because of the state of our axles, we turned to the experts and professionals at Camping World of Baxter where we first got our fish house. Their Service Center actually did a couple of huge projects with us including redesigning the inside of our fish house and most recently, they gave our fish house axles new life. The project is cumbersome to explain, but they basically honed and cleaned our axle hubs to restore them back to working state and then used a die grinder to cut in grooves to allow grease to move freely through the inside of the axles.
So how do we avoid a big repair project like this and also prevent a frustrating situation where our fish house is stuck on the ice with rusted and locked axles?
The short answer? Regular, good ol’ fashioned greasing with a grease gun. Here are some easy tips to keep those axles in tip-top shape:
How to Do Regular Maintenance On Your Fish House RV Axles:
- Grease the zerks on your axle hubs every three months during the off-season
- Grease the zerks after each use during the ice fishing season
- Lower your fish house jacks all the way down and grease the zerks on the axle hub until grease oozes out of the zerks
- After lowering the jacks all the way down, grab it by the leaf spring as somebody is greasing it. Tip the leaf spring back and forth to get the grease where it needs to go.
- Spray everything down with white lithium grease to protect it
- Disassemble the axle hub once a year and add grease around the entire pivot to make sure the whole hub is well lubricated.
- Consider installing additional zerk fittings to your hubs so that grease is able to get around 360 degrees
These are some easy steps you can take to make sure your fish house can be used for years to come. Just make sure to take care of your fish house when temperatures are warmer so that you don’t have to deal with a big repair while on the ice.
Be sure to check out my video on Our Dream Fish House + Renovation from Camping World as well as how Our Fish House Gets a Wrap on my YouTube channel and click subscribe!
Happy ice fishing!