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This Old Trailer: Troubleshooting the Ground Wire Part 3
Troubleshooting the Ground Wire Part 3 Episode of This Old Trailer
Next we will go ahead and talk about the ground on the tail lights themselves. Potential problems that could happen there. We have done all of the steps to make sure the grounds are good and then your lights still are not working then chances are it is with the tail light ground itself. Lets go move back there. On this particular ground problem here we see the blinker working but it is not as bright as it should be and also if you want to take a look at it, take a look at the truck. We actually have our running lights working too but we do not have the running lights working on the tail light. You can see how the tail light is trying to work but it is actually opposite the truck. The truck goes on the light goes off. They should be in time with each other. It could be something simple as a loose light. So we can actually just take the nuts in back and just tighten them down to see if we get any better performance out of it. 01:14
Something you can do if you are out in the road and all of a sudden it may quit working, try this first off. This is not a permanent fix but this will get you going. Okay lets go check the light out now. Now we have got our running light circuit working and the turn signals are in time with each other. And also you can tell it is a lot brighter too. Since we tightened these nuts down and we have got everything working fine we know that is our ground problem. So what we are actually going to do to fix it for real is we are going to go ahead and just take everything apart and basically clean it up and reassemble it. We are going to take off these nuts and go ahead and uninstall the light. Now you see we left the power on and we are totally disconnected from the ground it is actually trying to get ground through any available circuit. That is how we got that same problem to begin with flashing and no running lights. 02:20
Inside the slots here we will just scrape them out and wash it down to get back to bare metal and and then we will just go ahead and reassemble it really. Ideally you want to use a file to clean everything out but obviously not everybody is going have a set of metal files in their garage so you can get by with a nice screwdriver and just scrape it out really good and then on the back side of the steel here where the nut touches the angle iron here you want to go ahead and put some sand paper on that just to get all of the dirt and grime off of it too. Really you just want to clean it up really good and get down to the bare metal. And then you wash it down to pull out any extra junk. All right lets spray down the studs a little bit too on the light and clean those up. You can use a paper towel or your fingers or anything just to get the dirt and stuff out of the threads and basically what was really happening was that the nuts touching the steel and the nut transferred to the stud here and also to the edge of the threads are catching ground too. So everything you keep clean as possible will keep it lasting a lot longer. Take and we are actually using a battery terminal brush and just kind of clean it off. Dry it off and then we will just go ahead and reassemble it. Here is a little track for the wires. Make sure if fits in that track. If the wire gets up here you could actually mash the wire into the steel and cause a short that way. So lets go ahead and reassemble it and get our lights back on. You can already tell we are just touching it and it is wanting to work right away. All right go back to the other side and inspect our work. Make sure your are circuits working okay. 04:45
All right as you can see we have got our running light nice and bright and also the turn signal is working as it should. That was all just sticks in the ground issues with the lights. After you have got it all cleaned up put some spray paint over it that will kind of help protect the little seems and nooks and crannies from moisture getting inside there. Kind of like the plastic coating on top of the wire. We have demonstrated all of these fixes checking the ground on the trailer. The trailer itself is actually used as a ground obviously. Now there is some cases where you boat trailer guys and some small utility trailers out there, the ground is actually carried in a separate wire that lowers the trailer frame completely. The same tricks apply to check and make sure your light is working. Again the connection to the light could be bad or it could be actually a smashed wire underneath the frame of the trailer or also up front where you have got a little bit of road rash dragging the ground. We will go ahead and show you next an example of that type of wiring on a different trailer. All right this example here will show you that first off one way to check it to make sure is look at the 4-pole at the end of the trailer at the tongue, follow it down. If it does not stop anywhere where you have an opening or any parts to the frame or anything like that then chances are the ground is wearing inside the wiring harness. And on this example here we can start by looking at the tail light and we have got the wire harness. 06:11
On our other trailer it had two wires going to it, the right turn and the running light circuit. On this one we actually have three wires. The third wire would normally be going to the frame on the other trailer however on this one the third wire is our ground. So that tells us that our ground is carried in the wire itself. So it ignores the frame completely. So if you have something like this and you have some weird stuff going on check to make sure your ground wire is going to the light is good. I see this is a sealed connection but sometimes some of them will be bolted on the stud on the light itself to give you an example like that. Or this wire could somehow have gotten mashed somewhere up in the frame too. This is something for you tilt trailer guys out there. The big problem about that is on the tilt trailers is that you have a pivot point right here. You have got the tongue or the ground wires attached to and that ground has got to go through the tongue. Through this pivot point and out to the frame. In this case it is going straight through the axle which is not going to do us any good. If this was going to the frame the ground is going to get corroded up and rust and all of that stuff. Even though it kind of moves every now and then and scrapes it it still is not going to make a good connection. And there is a real simple fix for that. All you have got to do is run the wire from this point to the other side of the pivot point. Just enough for it to work and it carries the ground on both sides and then you do not have to worry about the lights flickering or anything like that.
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