Maintenance is one of the things I preach all the time. It’s imperative to keep your gear in top shape so you never get caught stranded anywhere. From my own personal experience, having oil-filled self-lubricating hubs on my trailer is the biggest pain in my existence.

Nothing is worse than walking out to hook up the boat and finding out that sometime during the course of a week or two, your hub seal decided to spring a leak, allowing the oil to run out of the hub. There is no way you can take the boat to the lake with no oil in the hub. You have to hope that you can find yourself someone who has the seals to replace them, get the boat over there, and wait for them to replace the seal. That in and of itself is no easy task, especially if the busted seal is on a tire that has brakes.