Escapees July-August 2024

gooseneck ball without touching the greasy ball with your hands. The B&W gooseneck ball kit also comes with two safety chain anchors that get inserted into the OEM puck system on the pickup. These secure the Reese safety chains that connect the Goose Box to the truck in the event of a catastrophic failure where the trailer disconnects from the truck while underway. Incidentally, the chains are sold separately and do not come with the Reese Goose Box.

kingpin, it will lower down and hit the top of the goose ball and stop right there rather than slipping over it as it is lowered into the locked position. We use a telescoping magnetic pole with a yellow ball on top to get a perfect left/right alignment. The Reese Goose Box has to be aligned accurately from front to back as well. For this, my husband, Mark, relies on me peer ing into the bed of the truck and guiding him verbally until the alignment is correct. If you hitch up solo, you’ll have to get out of the driver’s seat to check and get the truck positioned correctly — or have a better backup camera than we have on our 2016 Ram 3500 dually! Lowering And Locking The Reese Once the truck is positioned correctly, I use the landing jack leveling buttons to lower the Reese Goose Box onto the goose ball. We have auto-leveling on our truck so we have to give that system time to make its corrections as it senses the weight of the trailer in the truck bed, in fl ates the airbags and raises the truck bed up. Just like the locking mechanism on a fi fth -wheel hitch jaw, the Reese Goose Box auto matically locks the connection between the Goose Box kingpin and the gooseneck ball. It is very clear when that happens because the locking lever on the driver’s side of the Goose Box slowly moves from the Locked position (green label) to the Unlocked Position (red label) as the Goose Box slides over the goose ball, and then snaps back to the Locked position (green label) once it has locked in place. Once locked, I raise the landing jacks up all the way into their fully raised towing position. The fi nal steps to hitch up with the Reese Goose Box are to latch the two safety chains to the anchors in the truck’s OEM pucks and plug in the power cord. Like all kingpins, the Reese Goose Box has a trailer-brake safety cord. With our fi fth-wheel hitches, we always looped this cord around the hitch handle. With the Reese Goose Box, we loop it through the hook on one of the safety chains. The Reese Goose Box is equipped with internal air bags that use the same technol ogy as the Trail Air fi fth-wheel hitches. They

“Unhitching a trailer with a Reese Goose Box is as easy as pulling the cable to unlatch the clamps around the gooseneck ball while raising the landing jack legs!” Hitching Methods:

We discovered that hitching and unhitching the Reese Goose Box requires different techniques than we were accustomed to with conventional fi fth-wheel hitches. How ever, with some practice, it’s just as easy, if not downright easier. Hitching a trailer with a fi fth wheel hitch involves backing the truck into the trailer’s king pin. The truck moves horizontally, and the connection locks in place once the truck has backed the hitch jaws around the kingpin. Hitching a trailer using the Reese Goose Box involves lowering the trailer’s kingpin onto the gooseneck ball in the truck bed. The trailer’s king pin moves on a vertical axis using the trailer’s landing jack leveling system while the truck remains stationary. The connection locks in place once the Reese Goose Box has been fully lowered onto the ball. Witha fi fth-wheel hitch, it isn’t necessary to be perfectly aligned left to right (driver’s side to passenger’s side) due to the shape of the fi fth-wheel hitch jaws. If the fi fth-wheel hitch hits the kingpin a bit off center, the jaws of the hitch catch the kingpin and the two can still lock together. We could always “eyeball” this alignment. However, with the Reese Goose Box, if the truck is slightly to the right or left of the

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ESCAPEES Magazine July/August 2024