Wiring Harness Installation - 2005 GMC Safari

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Installation of a Wiring Harness on a 2005 GMC Safari

Today we are going to install part number 18172 from Tow Ready. It is a 4-pole wiring harness. This is the part that gets hard-wired into the vehicle. And we are going to install this on a 2005 GMC Safari. To wire up this vehicle what we are going to have to do is get behind the tail light - get behind both tail lights. What is going to happen here on the passengers side here - we are going to take it off, and then we are going to run our wires down to the bottom of the vehicle. So we will go ahead here and start taking off the tail lights at this point.

We will go ahead and disconnect the tail light assembly so it will not be hanging around, bouncing off the body work or anything like that. Just unsnap these bolts here. All right, and this part of the body work here we are actually going to drill through here - and it is hollow all the way through - and then we will come up through the bottom and drill the bottom half to run our wires through. Then we will go ahead and install the bushing of your choice we are going to use a plain rubber one here. All right, now we will go from the bottom and do the same thing and install another bushing. The point we are drilling at it is right behind this bracket here, up into the body work right here. Install the bushing help protect the wires. All right, the next step is we are going to run the fish wire down. This is going to take some patience, but you can use any wire that will hold its shape and it down from top to bottom. We have got light showing from the bottom so we can see what we are aiming for. There you go.

We are going to take our 4-pole wiring harness and we are just going to peel back the green part of it pretty much most of the way, should be good enough for now. Then we will just take our wire, our pull wire, and wrap it around our green wire and pull it back up. All right, and now at this point we can just go ahead and make a hard-wire connection to the wire harness in the vehicle. And just for reference, black is going to be our ground wire, brown is our running lights, and the dark green here is going to be our turn signals. So we will go ahead and make our connections to our dark green wire. So in this case it is going to be pretty much color for color in this install. All right, at this point we can go ahead and put our tail light assembly back together and start to work on the drivers side.

All right, we are just going to run our wire across in the bottom here in front of the hitch and over and we are just going to run it down to the hitch tube assembly. And then our three remaining wires are going to go back the same way across to the other side. Then we will our fish wire from the top to the bottom again and pull these three wires up through to the tail light. All right, we will go ahead and make our other hard-wire connections here. Yellow is going to be our left-turn signal, so we are going to run it yellow to yellow. And then we will hook up our brown wire, which will be running lights, and the brown wire on our van is going to be running lights, so we will hook that up - like I said, almost color to color. And then for our ground we are actually going to use the ground wire on the wire harness, which is black here. Pretty much most of this is all fiberglass. Obviously it is not going to be a good ground, so we are going to use the vehicle wire harness ground wire for that. Okay, we are going to start putting our tail light assembly back together for the drivers side now. We are also going to zip-tie a wire to the bumper. There are some convenient holes at the bottom edge of the bumper, so we are actually just going to zip-tie to those. Since it is the bottom, you can not really see it. This is just a work vehice, so it is working out perfectly, actually. We will take up any excess we do not want and take it behind the bumper and zip-tie it up. And with that, all that is left over is go ahead and test your install. And there you have it for part number 18172 from Tow Ready.

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