Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 1990 Ford F-150

Installation of a Brake Controller for a Trailer on a 1990 Ford F-150

Today on this 1990 Ford F-150, we are going to install part number ETBC7 and part number 118316 from Tow Ready. So with the ETBC7 kit we are going to install the brake controller part number 5500 from Draw-Tite and it is the activator to the brake controller. First off what we will do is we will start off by installing the 4-pole wiring flat part number 118316 and that will give us a 4-pole to work off of for ETBC7 kit. We are not going to use all of this wire here so what we will do is we will just go ahead and wrap it up next to the harness just to take up the extra slack because this is going to go right to the ETBC7 kit. And what will happen is we will plug this in to the ETBC7 kit which will get mounted onto the bumper. Which we want to install that bracket next.

Next we will get your 7-pole to 4-pole adapter ready to install but we will do that part on the work bench before we mount it to the truck. What we are going to do is actually just wind this up in electric tape and leave our leads out that we need. We will leave our 4-pole sticking out and we are going to need a brake wire which will be blue and our black wire for the 12 volt power supply and then we will just wrap up our purple and white wire and the white wire is going to go directly from frame to ground and then the purple wire is going to be for reverse lights if it is ever needed. Into our black and blue wires we are going to install our gray cable which has the black and white wires inside of it. What we are going to do is just peel away the gray sheet, strip our wires back, and make our connection.

And we are going to go black to black and white to blue. Cover those up with some electric tape. Next we will go ahead and install the loom along the wires like this. All right, we will go ahead and install the assembly onto our bracket underneath the truck. Next we can go ahead and connect our 4-poles together with some dielectric grease in here to help protect the connections. We are going to zip tie around it. It will probably be a good idea to wrap some electrical tape around that too. We are going to take our main cable and just go ahead and just zip tie it up and hold it out of the way. We will go up to the harness of the vehicle. Next we will work on our ground wire. What we will do is we will actually go ahead and ground up to the frame. A cross member will work just fine. All right now take the rest of our wires and just zip tie them and bundle them up out of the way. We now can go ahead and start running our wire up to the front of the vehicle under the frame. When we run our cable up to the battery, just be careful to stay away from the exhaust because things can get kind of close right here. And we will just layer our cable and we will zip tie it to the frame. We will go ahead and start mounting our circuit breakers and those will mount right here and one is going to go right next to it. So what we are going to do is we are going to figure out how we are going to run our wire.

Make sure it stays away from anything that is going to move like the hinge for the hood, and then we are going to need to go through the battery terminal lead on the positive side and then the rest of our wire will go between the brake controller and the battery. All right, cut our length, and then all we have got to do is strip our wire back to go to our circuit breakers here. And the white wire again will go to our output on our brake controller. And then again our white wire is going to go back, towards the brake controller so let us push that back and out of our way and then this black wire here is going to go with to a 40 amp breaker because there is going to be a 12 volt power supply going on out back. The silver side goes to the accessory which is our 12 volt output. And the copper side goes to the battery. Now the next thing we are going to do is go ahead and start running some extra cable again from the 30 amp circuit breaker to our break controller that will be inside the vehicle. Just like before we will put a ring terminal on to the silver connection and then from our copper one we will go back out to the battery. Take the remaining wire again put a ring terminal on it. Okay again we are going to leave those two as the last connections. And then our ground wire here, again this is our ground wire that is going to the brake controller not to be confused with the other white wire that is going to go back to the output of the brake controller. This is our ground wire. We will go ahead and put a ring terminal on that so we can hook up to the battery ground. At this point you probably want to take a few seconds to wrap some zip ties around the wires again to keep them secure from bouncing around hitting anything we do not need to. On our white wire that is going to the brake controller output to the blue we will go ahead and make an extension for it. We are just going to use some scrap wire we had lying around and we are going to just go ahead and convert to blue right now hopefully it will make a little bit more sense. You are going to run the blue wire back across towards the fire wall where we are going to have to punch a hole through it to run our wires inside and out. All right, now let us go find a spot in the fire wall to make our way out from the inside. Take out this rubber plug right here. This goes straight through the outside. It does hold up some of this material inside here and actually works out pretty good. There is a lot holding it up. We can just go ahead and pull it out. Poke the rest of our bushing out the other side. Somehow it is supposed to have a protective coating on the back side like a little plastic shield, a kind of cloth shield. It is thin enough to where you can just take a screwdriver and just poke right through the other side.

What we will do is we will go from the outside and enlarge it from that side too. And on this side here we are just going to enlarge it so it is a bigger hole to make it easy to run our wires through and install our ground. What we did is we actually pulled a little pull wire from the inside out and then we are just going to wrap around the wires we are going to pull in back through the inside. We will get our wires ready to hook up the brake controller to. Again we can strip the gray sheath off. Do the same thing to our brake controller wires. And we will hook them up color to color. Now we will take our red wire and we are going to find a colored side of the brake switch and attach to that. One important note about the Ford vehicles from 89 to 91 is that if they have any light brakes you can not use wire coming directly out of the brake switch. If you do not have your vehicle is ABS or not, you can always use this wire right here with this crescent shaped connector. Instructions for you to activate just show you what location it is and the second wire here on the top row of the crescent shaped connector. And you can test it to make sure it is the right one. So we will just go ahead and use this supplied quick splice that came with the brake controller. Okay, we have got a good connection there so now we can just go ahead and bundle up our wires and make them nice and neat and you are ready to mount the brake controller to the dash. Next we are going to go ahead and mount our brake controller. If it is larger than that that is your personal choice move it up or down any way you like it just make sure there is nothing behind it and there is a like location just go ahead and run the screw right on through the plastic. All right I am going to use a couple of zip ties to hold up our wires then we are going to start making our connections to the battery. I will go ahead and start disconnecting the negative terminal in the battery that will go with the positive terminal. If your truck is a diesel like this one, make sure you disconnect both batteries. All right, we have got our ground hooked up. There are two leads going to the battery. One for the 12 volt power supply going out the back of the vehicle and the other one for the brake controller itself. For a quick check of the brake controller to see if we have power we can read the manual over right here we will get a dot so we know if we have got power going to it. When you plug the trailer into it you will get numbers to show up. All right. And that finishes our install part number ETBC7 that is activated to part number 5500 and also part number 118316, the T-1 connector from Tow Ready.