Adapter 4 Pole to 5 Pole Trailer Wiring Adapter - Shorter

Video Transcript for Hopkins 4-Pole to 5-Pole Trailer Wiring Adapter Installation

Today we are going to show you how to install the 4-wire flat to 5-wire flat adapter, part number 47515 from Hopkins Towing Solutions. This adapter piece allows us to plug in to the vehicles existing 4-pole plug and adapt to a 5-pole plug that you find commonly on boat trailers with hydraulic brakes that offer a reverse lockout. The adapter piece itself is very simple to install. Again, you have the one side that is going to plug into the vehicles existing 4-pole and the other end will come out with the new 5-pole plug that you will need for your trailer. What we do need to do for this adapter, however, the fifth wire is the reverse lead. So we will need to find the reverse wire on the tow vehicle and manually tap this in. So we are going to start by just plugging the 4-pole in, into the vehicle harness. And then we need to figure out a way to get up to the reverse wire on the vehicle. 0:53

Another nice feature of this adapter is that right in the middle of our reverse wire is a disconnect point. So what we can do is I can actually go ahead and disconnect that wire that is in behind the taillight and it through. But once it is installed, it will allow you to leave this end connected to the vehicle at all times. And if you want to remove the adapter from the vehicle you can just disconnect it at the quick disconnect point. Now the easiest place to wire in the reverse lead is actually behind the taillight itself. We want to go ahead and figure out how we can get behind the taillight assembly. Now on this particular vehicle, if we follow over to the driver side, underneath where the taillight is mounted, there is a hole there that we can easily route the wire up and get behind the taillight. So we are next going to go ahead and take off the driver side taillight and figure out which wire is the reverse wire. Ok, so I am up to the driver side taillight now and we need to figure out obviously how to remove it so we can get to the wires. On this particular vehicle, the mounting screws are on the inboard side. There are two of them here. Take those out so we can get to the wires. 2:09

Ok, with the taillight pulled off, we can see the wires here. And again we are looking for the wire that is activating our reverse lead. The reverse light on the vehicle is always behind the clear lens. So if we go behind the taillight, the two wires going into the clear lens. This one is the ground and this one is going to be our reverse light. And again, on this vehicle it is a red wire with blue stripe. So I am going to cut back a little bit of the tape to hook in my quick splice. From there we will take the provided quick splice, mount it over top of the red wire here and then we will take our other half of our reverse lead wire from our adapter and go ahead and slide it into the other groove on the quick splice. Just take a pair of plyers and we are going to crimp down on the metal tab on the top. And out connection is made. From there we want to go ahead and take the other end of the wire and just feed it down through the opening that we had found earlier. And you want to just feed the full lead down. And then we can go ahead and put our taillight back on. And then back underneath the vehicle, we just need to route the reverse lead wire back over to our adapter. Plug the two pieces together and our installation is complete on it. From there you just want to take your blue wire and go ahead and secure it up out of the way, with some zip-ties if need be. Now I do want to note that this is essentially an adapter piece but it actually does not need to be ever removed from the 4-pole because a trailer 4-pole will actually plug into this new adapter piece just fine, just like it did on a common 4-pole. And that will conclude the installation of the Hopkins 4 to 5-pole adapter, part number 47515.