Trailer Brakes and Wiring Installation
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Installation of Trailer Brakes and Wiring on a Trailer Without Them Previously
Today we are going to show you how to install brakes on a trailer that does not have existing brakes. It is actually pretty easy to do it is just very time consuming. There are a few things you want to look out for before you start. One of those things is look being the existing hub you have. Make sure you have a flange like this on the axle. It is this 4 bolt flange on here if you have that on your axle your pretty much home free. You will see it on 3,500 pound axles like we have here. You also see it on 2,000 pound axles. On a 3,500 pound one you would probably use a 10 inch drum and on a lighter 2000 pounds, you would use a 7 inch size. Also you notice we have the hub missing. We have to take that off because the hub and drum assembly it is all in one piece. You have to take off the old hub get rid of it and start off fresh.
For this install we are going to install the backing plate. Basically it slides on like so then you just bolt it onto 4 places. A couple things you might want to take note of is there is a left and right side to it also an up and down. The magnet always stays pointed to the ground. If you did not have a sticker like this one does another way to tell is look for this bow here. The actuating arm or bow always points to the front of the trailer so thats a good reference point for you. At this point lets start bolting on our hubs. Works down in a criss cross pattern makes sure you have them evenly tightened. Go ahead and do the same thing for the other side. One thing to note while you are adding the hubs to a trailer. Take a look at the spindle. Take this spindle for example it is whats called an EZ Lube spindle it has a Zerk fitting on the end. What happens is grease travels through the middle of the spindle and comes out this hole here. If you have that it is great, but the thing is when you get a new hub you want to make sure what kind of seal it comes with. Most of the hubs will come with a regular single lip seal. You can see the just one lip right here. It has been around for ages and works great. However if you use this with an EZ Lube Spindle what happens is grease gets pulled in and applies pressure to this. So what you want to do is get whats called a double lip seal. As you can see here it has a lip on the inside edge here along with the lip on the outside too. This is double protection that keeps grease in and has a little bit extra pressure. You can also tell it is a double lip seal because it has a spring. Every double lip seal out there has a spring in it. So you have an EZ Lube Spindle or double check. Just to be on the safe side go ahead and order a double lip seal. You can see where our hub is sealed right on the end. You could call it the bearing or seal surface. This is where you are inside bearing rides right here. As you can see here there is the hole that the grease comes out between this seal and this bearing.
Once put together this whole area is going to fill up with grease. Of course it can not come from over top because your race is here. What happens is the grease comes up and fills up here first. Then comes through your rollers and actually through the middle of this cavity here. Then the whole thing gets packed full of grease. Once that is packed full of grease it will travel through the rollers of the outside bearing and come through here and out by the nut. Once the grease is full up to the the nut you know it is fully packed and ready to go. It is completely waterproof at the same time actually. At this point we can go ahead and slip on our hubs. We have our spindle lightly greased and our bearings are already packed so we will go ahead and put them together. Some spindles like this one come with a tang washer. If yours is just the normal spindle then you just have a counter pin that goes through. In this case we have the EZ Lube spindle so we will go ahead and assemble it. It is only one extra step involved. Make sure you take out any play. A little bit is fine just a hair is all you need. Then flip this edge into place like so. Get it to stop then bring it back one notch. If you had a regular spindle we would be finished by now but since we have the EZ Lube spindle we will go ahead and use that feature fully pack the bearings and bring out the grease to both bearings. Installing our hub is complete now. The next step is to adjust the brakes. From here what we need to do is go ahead and adjust our brakes. Basically what we are going to do is tighten up the drum until it stops turning. Then back off 10 clicks then you should have a very fine light drag. What we need to do now is go ahead and start running the wires. We are going to follow the factory harness back onto the driver side wheel. Then we are going to follow the axle on over to the passenger side wheel. Once you are by the axle here go ahead and leave a little loop for working room. Then make sure it is tied to your passenger side wheel. We will go ahead and at this point zip tie the wire to the axle. At this point you have your wire set across the axle the way you want it so we will go ahead and pull the slack up to the front of the trailer. We will go ahead and make our connection to the wires here. Make sure you note that one wire goes to ground and the other wire goes to positive. Again it does not matter the magnet does not care. We will go ahead and split our wire here. To make our connections there are a variety of different ways to do it. You can use the scotch lock connectors like we are going to use here. You can also use butt connectors also it is more a personal preference. For clarity or ease of use we are going to use the scotch locks here. From here you can tape them up or apply seal to them as you see fit. Then once these are sealed up you can zip tie them to the axle and keep them out of the way so they do not get smashed.
We will move over to our driver side now and what we are going to do is install our ground on the inside of the frame here. You can put it where ever you want but we are going to put it back here to make it a little nicer. Then run our ground wire all the way back up to the front. So we will just go ahead and open up the sheath again. We will then split our wire here and add 2 ring terminals there. Now what we did was run our wire and mix it in with the others up front making it look nice and neat. We are going to put our 7 pole connector on next. First you slide on the cover then you strip these wires and add ring terminals to them so the connector fits inside. It is time to connect to 7 pole connector. What you want to do is match up the colors obviously but there are a few different codes. For instance sometimes red is left turn but on the trailer it is actually yellow. The only common ones is white is ground wire and blue will be used as our black wire. Which the black wire is actually used on here as the 12 volt power lead. We will start off with the ones that match up and that would be the white. Then we will do the brake wire and on the trailer it is black but on the 7 pole it will be blue. Left turn on our trailer is yellow but the left turn on our 7 pole is red. We have green here which is running light and on the trailer it is brown. Finally green is right turn on our trailer and that is brown on our 7 pole. Next we put our connector back in with the little screw. We fix our loom and tighten the last screw. With that our installation is complete all we have to do is test it.
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