Dropping neck on mechanical DD

Remove air line. Lock your cylinder neck pin, drop your air bags, pull your 4x4, unlock your fifth wheel, roll forward. The front of the neck needs to come down.

Then you roll your dowels back forward, back up and lift the trailer.

 

You will probably need a shorter height block in the future. Once you find the right block guard it with your life, otherwise you will struggle with the neck continually.

 

The right height block is important, but you also gotta watch where you place it in regards of the slope of the neck in my opinion.

I hardly ever put the block in to where it's wedged super tight before I pull away with the neck. I try to get it to where it's somewhat loose an then let the neck bite down on the 4x4 when I air my bags as I slowly pull away.

 

It looks like you got it figured out. I'm glad. There is a lot of people on here with valuable info! I wish I could have helped more. I hate to see someone in a jam. Good luck with the new equipment. And I learned something also about the dowels retracting.

 

I've seen a few, as soon as I saw the fixed dogbones I figured that was the only way to drop the trailer.

 

That setup looks very similar to our hyd Talbert, the dowels don't retract though, the hyd does all the work.
It does have the same safety latch, but the pin on ours will stay up if you pull out the red button. It will eventually leak back down but will stay up for a minute or so.
I'm not a big fan of the Talbert design. it can be temperamental to get back hooked up if you don't have everything just right, I would imagine it would be even worse on a manual. Other neck hook designs are more forgiving.

 

Can’t believe we got thru this without X1.............