Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2000 Chevy Silverado Part 2

Installation of a Brake Controller for a Trailer on a 2000 Chevy Silverado Part 2

The wires are ran from the rear to the front. However, they are pretty much out of reach. They are actually buried right down below the brake booster here. The blue and orange wires are kind of coiled up there. Basically, you have to climb on top of the engine, reach down and break them loose and pull them up. And even so, half of the time they are not long enough to work with. So you have to extend them, especially for the blue wire anyway. All right, the next thing that I am going to do, since we are here, is go ahead and hook up our hot lead. Basically, you can use either one of these posts. I believe these two fuses take care of the power going to these posts. And they fit in the little pocket there. They do not come with any nuts on here. So, you will have to go out and get you some metric 10 millimeter nuts to fit this stud. You will have to get this nut separate, from the hardware store. And it is an 8 millimeter nut in thickness and diameter. And the thread pitch is 1.25. 0:46 Put that on there for now. Next what we need to do is go underneath the dash and drill out a hole to get between the engine compartment and the dashboard. 0:55

A good place, or marker, is this little plug area right here for a little carpet and insulation. Pop that out and right behind there is a good location to drill out through. Be careful, because it is kind of low in this area, is a wire harness on the other side. So, tend to drill a little bit high. But do enough to get through and with a pilot bit. Make sure you know where all of your wires are at before you drill out your bigger hole or grommet. And then, while we are down here, we might as well go find the wire for our brake light switch. On the GMC and Chevrolets, year after year the wiring harness kind of varied in its location. The best rule of thumb really is to just follow the brake pedal all of the way up up to the brake switch. And reach up and try to feel for a harness and then follow it all of the way back down till you can see it in an easier location to get to. Sometimes I have found that the harness actually comes down like right here. If you are not sure, try to find the wires that come out of the switch and then compare the wires in the harness here. If they are the same color wires, chances are you probably have the right harness. Some are over here. Sometimes you can find it over and closer to the wall. Sometimes, I have actually found one inside the bigger harness here. But it is always better to come off directly from the brake switch. It is best if possible. 2:06

And we will go ahead and just test one of these wires here. Usually on GMC and Chevrolet products, it is going to be the white wire. Occasionally, I have had a yellow wire. And what you want to test for, is make sure it comes on only when you hit the brake switch, not when you hit the left or right brake signal. Okay, turn on our turn signal again just to double check it. Okay nothing there. All right and that is the wire we will use to hook up our red wire from the brake controller to that. 2:46

And mounting the brake controller, what we will do next is a couple notes about this brake controller. It is pretty nice where it has kind of a flat edge to it, it is kind of curved. So if you have a dash with an even surface and an angle, you can just put it right there. It looks pretty nice. In our case, we do not really have anything that is flat within easy reach. So, with the bracket, you can actually swivel it on the bracket so much. So we will actually put our bracket here, then install our brake controller and tilt it up as far as possible. Just make sure you have enough room to get out of the way for the 4 by 4 system too. Okay you have your choice of mounting it like this, or you can mount it like this too. And really it is just personal preference. But, if anything, you want to have it in easy reach as best as possible. 3:33

And then we can start making our connections to the rest of the truck. We will start of with the red wire and we will extend this red wire and make our connections to the brake light switch. Now we just need to run our last three wires. We will run our blue wire out from here and match the blue wire from the tow package on the truck. And just run the rest of our blue wire out through the hole in the fire wall and out to the blue wire on the harness. Alright, go ahead and make our connection here. And we have more than enough here. But you never know, in case you have to take it apart for whatever reason. So it is good to have some built in slack. We will just tape that up to secure it. And we can just tuck that out of our way and maybe just zip-tie it later.