Brake Controller Installation - 2008 Ford F250 Super Duty
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Products Featured in this Video
2-8 Brake Electronic Brake Controller by Draw-Tite and Reese - Time Delayed
5500
$79.95
Manufacturer Instructions
Installation of a Brake Controller on a 2008 Ford F250 Super Duty
Today we are going to be installing brake controller part number 5500 from Draw-Tite on a 2008 Ford F250 Super Duty. Inside the cab here, the first thing you want to do is go ahead and locate the factory-installed brake control port that the Super Duty has. If your vehicle does not come with the in-dash brake controller, which is typically in this location here, the plug will actually be in a holder, mounted on the back side of this piece right here.
The first thing we want to do is go ahead and pop this piece out and locate the factory control plug. With the faceplate removed, you can see mounted on the back side here is the factory connector for the brake controller, and it just kind of in a holder here. And if I flip it over you can see there is a factory clip. We just want to press that release button there and pull it right out. On this particular vehicle, it came with the plug-in for the harness itself. If your vehicle does not come with this particular plug-in, you can also purchase it separately. We do offer it, and the part number is 20270. At this time, I am not actually going to plug it in. I am going to go ahead and route the wires from it over to our mounting location where we are going to mount our brake controller.
We are underneath the steering column here. And, again, we are trying to find a suitable mounting location for the brake controller. Most brake controllers we mount to the right-hand side of the steering wheel somewhere down in this area. On this particular vehicle, you can see we have already drilled out the holes and we are going to go ahead and mount it to the left side of the steering wheel. So, in order for me to get the wires all the way over to this location, I did have to extend the wires. And I went ahead and, when I extended them, I actually changed their colors so that they match perfectly with the colors on the 5500. And as you can see, the wires on the factory harness here are a little bit different, colorwise, than the wires that I used to extend. The yellow wire here with the green stripe on it is for the brake switch, which, again, is going to be the red wire on the 5500. The blue is actually going to be blue, as well, so I went ahead and did blue to blue. The light-gauge black wire is the ground, and I changed that to white. And then, the red power feed I went ahead and changed to black. So, again, once I brought all these wires over, the colors will match perfectly with the 5500 brake controller. There is a very small opening here, in between the cigarette lighter and the mounting brackets behind this faceplate here, that I can fish the wires through.
OK, we have gone ahead and continued the fishing of the wires and gotten them over to our mounting location over here on the left-hand side. And at this time I am going to go ahead and mount the bracket for the brake controller. And, again, we had already put some pre-existing holes into the dash area here. OK, with the bracket mounted into position, we can go ahead and hook up our brake controller. And, again, it is preferable to mount your brake controller in an area where it is not going to interfere with your driving abilities. But you do want it in a place where you can easily gain access to it by hand in case of an emergency braking situation. And, again, as you can see, our colors are going to match exactly with the colors on the brake controller, so all we need to do is splice them together, color for color.
OK, I am going to go ahead and shorten the lead here, because obviously we have more wire than we need. OK, with our connections made to the brake controller, we can go ahead and connect our two factory clips here to ensure that the brake controller is working properly, everything is going OK. Then we can go ahead and tape up our connections and secure any loose wires. With the excess wires secured up behind the dash, we can go ahead and put the faceplate back on. And this concludes the installation of part number 5500 from Draw-Tite on a 2008 Ford F250 Super Duty.
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