The Pins on Our B&W Companion Looked Wrong — Here’s What B&W Said

We were halfway through our seasonal B&W Companion hitch maintenance when we spotted it: the jaw pins were sitting up out of the plate. This is the piece of steel that connects our truck to our fifth wheel, and part of it didn’t look the way we remembered. If you tow, you know that feeling — it’s not panic, it’s the slow “wait, is that supposed to do that?” that ruins the rest of your afternoon.

B&W Companion hitch maintenance is the easy part

Here’s the thing nobody tells you before you buy a fifth wheel hitch: the routine upkeep on a B&W Companion is genuinely simple. Shop towels, brake cleaner on the jaws, fresh grease on the mating surface, white lithium on the pivot points, and one zerk fitting underneath. One driveway session, once a season, and the whole thing goes back together — in the video you’ll see the moment it drops on and Matt’s two-word review of the fit.

We even found a truck feature that makes the job easier that we’d never used before. That one’s in the video too.

Then we found the pins — and called B&W

The raised pins were the part we couldn’t wipe away with a shop towel. So we went straight to the source: we contacted B&W and asked.

This is where B&W earned some real respect from us. No runaround, no “take it to a dealer” brush-off. They answered the question directly — and they sent us their official factory procedure for the exact job we were staring at. A hitch company that hands an owner the actual document instead of a canned reply is rarer than it should be.

What that document said surprised us. It changed what we were about to do to this hitch that afternoon — and it’s the reason there’s one job on the Companion we now deliberately leave alone. The five reasons why are in the video, and if you tow with one of these hitches, number five alone is worth the watch.

Get the official B&W procedure

We’re making the factory document available as a free download — the same one B&W sent us, with the exact hardware sizes and the check that matters most. Grab it here: Download the official B&W cleaning procedure.

Watch the full maintenance routine, the pin discovery, and what B&W told us:

New episodes every Sunday — subscribe on YouTube so you don’t miss the next one. Speaking of which: the next haul is New River Gorge, West Virginia, and we’re bringing you with us.