Air Lift Load Controller Compressor System for Air Helper Springs- Heavy Duty - Single Path

Video Transcript for Air Lift Load Controller Compressor System Installation - 2014 Ford F-150

Today in our 2014 Ford F-150, we'll be installing the Air Lift Load Controller Compressor System for Air Helper Springs, part number AL25854. Having a compressor like this is a lot faster and more convenient way to monitor and maintain the pressures in your airbags. You don't have to get out of your vehicle and use a air chuck and air-up the bags manually using the Schrader valves that we have in the back of the truck, although we do have one mounted on the back of our vehicle in case we have a problem with our system. We can actually check the air pressure there or add more or take it out if we need to. That's a nice feature about it. You can do it both ways. You may notice that our gauge has a nice, white backlit display, so it'll be easy to see in all lighting conditions.

The system will automatically inflate to the minimum pressure that your airbags require as necessary. That's where the leak detection is that we have underneath the dash. It is a nice compact package, and it's fairly easy to install. You have plenty of room underneath your dash after we have it all mounted, so it's not going to get in the way of your feet while you're driving. Here's what our kit consists of. We have our heavy-duty compressor right here.

Already has a fitting on it, so we can connect our air lines, too. We have a 25-foot section of air-line tubing. We have our gauge with our controls to adjust our air pressure. This is a single-stage system, so you'll be able to control one set of air bags together. You can't adjust them independently.

You can either go up or down, and they'll both go up or down equally. We have our wiring harness with a relay, and this'll tap into an ignition fuse on your vehicle. Then, the big power wire here runs all the way back to your compressor. The system will not drain your battery when it kicks on automatically via your low-pressure switch here because it'll only run when the key in the ignition is in the Run position. The first thing we need to do is find a place to mount our compressor. On the back of our driver side of our bed, this is about the best spot we're going to find for it. We're going the use the compressor as a template and make a couple holes.

With those marked, we'll drive those out. With one of our holes drilled out, we'll do the same for the other three. With all of our holes drilled, we can now install our compressor with the included hardware using a couple machine screws and some washers on the front of it. In the backside, we'll place our flat washer, the starlock washer, and one of our nuts. Do the same for all four of the bolts. Now that our compressor's mounted, we'll screw on our air filter here. Now, we have a cup of hot water here, and we're going to soak our air line in it on one end so we can easily install it onto our compressor line. Now that we have that soaking, we'll come over to our compressor, we'll unscrew this nut that's on our line, and we'll hand onto it for the time being. We'll slide our nut over the tubing, so we'll slide our line past our barb. Once we have it pushed all the way over end of our barb flushed with the threads, we'll take our nut, and we'll tighten it down. This'll act like a compression fitting and keep our air line secured to our compressor. We'll tighten it down with a wrench to make sure that it's nice and snug and secure. Where our manual inflation valve is for our airbags that've been previously installed, we need to T into this for our compressor to attach, so we'll come in the middle, and we will snip it, take one of our T-fittings. We'll push it on where it goes to our inflation valve and then back towards our airbags. This segment of line right here will go towards our compressor. We'll measure off a rough segment of how much we're going to need. Right about here will be plenty. We'll cut off the excess, and we'll make our connection to our T-fitting going over our frame on our vehicle, and we'll tap into there. Once we push it in all the way in our fitting, you can pull back on it and make sure it's secure. If we ever need to release it, you just push in on the tab and pull back. To keep our fitting here from our compressor rattling against the frame, we'll take a zip tie, and we will secure it to the frame. Now, we need to have one final key connection that'll go towards our front of our vehicle for our gauge and our controller. I'm going to do this on our line that connects our two airbags together, so I'm just going to cut right here. With that T-fitting in place, we can begin the installation inside the vehicle now. We're going to be mounting our Air Lift control gauge underneath our dash, so we're going to be using the mount here that you secure as a surface mount, not a flush mount. We'll take the end of our wire. We'll feed it through the cup and out through this hole. Once we have it like this, we're not going to insert the gauge all the way in because we need to feed the air line through the hole and make our connection there. We have our wire fed through. This is a good enough starting point for us to attach it to our dash. We want to find a place to mount our gauge where we can easily see it and easily access the buttons while we're driving. We're going to mount it like you would a brake controller. If you didn't have one built in your vehicle already, basically the upper-right section of you dash right by the steering column, right in this area here, is a great spot. You can see we can easily see where it's going to be at and be easily be able to press our buttons, and it won't be in the way of our feet while we're driving. We can take this off, use our mount right here, and we'll secure it to the dash with the supplied screws. With that done, we have a nice, solid mount for our gauge. Now, we'll take the nylon lock nut that's included that sits inside our gauge pod here and this recess for it. We'll slide it over our mount and install our screw that'll hold it to it. We'll tighten the screw on down to hold it in place. Now, our four little wires that come off the back of our gauge and controller, these are 22-gauge wire, so you want to be careful when you're working with these because they are really small and really fragile. We're going to strip off a little bit more of the insulation here on all four of them just so we have a little bit more to work with. We're going to working with the black and white wires right now, so we fold these green and red ones out of the way. We have some of these female spade terminals that come with our kit. We'll install one on each wire. We'll crimp it into place. Okay. With those two done, we can tie our red and green wires together. With those two tied together, we'll put another one of those female spade terminals on, and we'll crimp it down, too. Now, with our leads that we made off of our controller harness, we'll take the relay harness that we have, and the black wire will go to black wire. See this one has a male end The ones we put on we're female, so we'll just slide the together, push it in until it stops and secure. Then, we will do the white wire here to this gray wire. Again, same principle: male, female. Then, this red and green will go to our last one, the pink one. Now, we'll take our low-pressure cutoff switch. We have two additional wires from our wiring harness. There's a gray and a black. The black will connect to the part labeled "C." It's off to the right-hand side. The gray will connect to the other terminal, the left-hand side labeled "NC." We're on the passenger side of our vehicle now. Underneath our glove box to the right, this kick-panel right here, that's where our fuse box is. I'll pull this door out and remove it to gain access to our fuse box. The fuse box is right here. Take the lid off of it. Squeeze these tabs. It comes off. Have your handy fuse puller right here in the back of it. We'll use that. Take our test light, and we're looking for a fuse that's only hot when the ignition is on. I'll check over here with the ignition off. Right now, I have a fuse. It's all the way over to the right. It's the fourth fuse up from the bottom. If we turn the key on in the ignition, this fuse should go hot. We're going to pull this fuse, and this'll be the one we use. With our fuse pulled, we want to find out which side of the fuse box is the hot side. We'll be using a 10-amp fuse, which is the same amperage as what we pulled out. As you can see, our fuses are the same width. The tabs are the same width as each other, too, so this will slide in there just fine. It'll just stick out further. That's the only difference, but that won't matter. We need that because our fuse tap that we're adding on here won't slide over here on this fuse, but this fuse you slide one leg on through like that, and then it stands over your fuse like this, and you can make your connection based upon this. Now, we'll turn our ignition off, and we'll make our connection. Now, we'll take our fuse holder here. We'll strip out the insulation on one end. We'll take our small, blue connector here. It's got a female end. We'll install it over our fuse holder like so, and we'll crimp it down into place. With that done, we have a nice, solid connection. We can plug this onto our fuse tap. Remember that fuse is only hot when the vehicle has the key in the ignition, so it won't matter that anything's plugged into it right not. Also, we don't have a fuse in our fuse holder here, so there will be no current to pass through. It'll plug on in there just like that. Now, we can bring our pink wire over from our wiring harness, and it will attach to this. Now, we can take a length of red wire. If you have any spare wire laying around, you can use that, as long as it's the right gauge, the same gauge wire as your fuse holder. Alternatively, you can just cut it off the end of your harness that goes back to the compressor because you should have some excess wire from that. We have this length of wire here, and we will strip off the end. I'll strip off the insulation off one end. We'll install a butt connector that's included with the kit, and we'll crimp it on down. We'll go to our fuse holder, strip off the insulation off one end of it, and we'll install that to the butt connector. We'll crimp that on down just like that. Now, our red wire will run behind our center console and underneath our carpet a little bit to hide it, and we'll run this over to our driver side. We're using a piece of our air-line tubing as a fish wire to hopefully help push it through. Our air-line tubing that we pushed through, we'll tape our wire to it, and I'll pull it on through the center console. The reason we're doing this is because this air-line tubing is more rigid. Our wire was just getting kinked and we couldn't pull it all the way through by hand. This will assist us. With that taped to it, we'll just pull our fish wire from our air-line tubing on through. Once it's through, we'll take off our air-line tubing and set it aside in case we need it again. Now, our wire and our fuse holder here, we'll just peel back our carpet, and I'll tuck it behind it. Before we tuck our fuse holder away, we'll install our fuse into it that's included, 15-amp. Remember our key's not in the ignition, so there's no power going through it even with the fuse installed. Okay. We'll tuck our wire and our fuse holder behind the carpet so it's hidden. We can reinstall our fuse box door cover. Our lid from our fuse box we will not be able to reinstall this because of this part sticking our here, but we'll have our panel here to cover it all up, and it'll be fine. With that pushed back in, there's nothing exposed in our passenger side, and we can move back to our driver side. Our red wire that we ran through the center console, strip back some of the insulation on it. We'll install another one of these yellow butt connectors and crimp it on down. We'll take the pink wire off our relay harness here. We'll strip it back, and we'll install it on our butt connector. At this point, we want to make sure that we have nothing tangled up. That way we can easily conceal our wiring underneath the dash. With our wire ran up a little bit above our dash, we'll install the pink wire now, and we'll crimp it down. Make sure this is secure, which it is. Just to the right of our hood release grommet, we're going to cut back this insulation on the firewall so we have access to it. Once you can start to see paint the same color as your truck, you know you're through. Perfect. I've already verified in our engine bay that there's nothing behind this that we have to worry about drilling through. We're going to drill a hole through our firewall and put a grommet in place. We're going to enlarge that hole a little bit and then place a grommet inside of it. Now, we have a hole large enough for our air-line tubing and our wire to pass through. We'll find a grommet the right size to fit it. Here's a grommet that we have. There's our hole down there to the left side, since we're looking at the firewall from the opposite direction next to our hood release cable grommet. We'll push this grommet into the firewall. With our grommet pushed in, we now have a nice, clean hole for our wire and our air-line tubing to pass through where it won't get chafed against the firewall. Now, we can pull our gauge out. Our nipple that our air line goes to is on the left side. If we look down at our cup, there's a hole off to the left side in the back. We'll push our air line to the back of that hole, and we'll plug it into our nipple. With our hose pushed on all the way, we'll feed our power line and our air hose back and push our gauge and control module into the cup. We can tighten our screw down all the way now. Before we place our air-line tubing through our firewall, we're going to tape our red line to it for our power to go back to our compressor. This way we don't have to fish two wires through at once. With that through, we'll pull it through our firewall under the engine bay. We'll continue pulling it forward, making sure we don't get any tangles as we're pulling it through. I went ahead and zip-tied all of our wiring up underneath our dashboard so it's up and out of our way. That leaves us with two more connection points inside the car. We have our ground wire here and then our low-air-pressure sensor where we have to tap into our air line. Our air line's right here, so we'll just cut it right in the middle and take our sensor, and we'll plug it in on our air line. With that plugged in, we can now zip-tie that up all the way and then connect our ground wire. I'll put one zip tie on it to make sure it doesn't fall down. On our driver side kick-panel, there's a bolt behind here that's a factory ground. We'll hook our ground wire up onto that, so I'll pull back on this panel a bit to get a little bit more room. With our bolt removed, we'll place our ground wire onto the bolt. We'll take our wire, route it behind our parking brake here, and I'll make sure all of our wire is tucked up nicely behind our parking brake. With the top one secured, our wire's not going to be in the way of the parking brake, and it won't get damaged. We'll bundle up the loop down here and secure it to the wiring harness with another zip tie. We dropped our power wire and our air line down from our engine bay, and we followed this wiring harness down to the back of the truck. We secured it along the wiring harness with multiple zip ties along the way. We'll just go ahead and trim these excess zip tie off now, and you can see how we have it routed. When we did this, we made sure we paid consideration to avoid any moving parts or sources of heat, such as the exhaust. At this point, our wiring harness goes up over our frame and then switches to the inside. Right about in this area here, we had to extend our power wire with the appropriate-gauge wire so it'll reach our compressor. The wire that we had was black, so you'll notice when we get towards our compressor that the color of the wire has changed. You can see where our wiring harness comes in next to our fuel tank. We have it secured there. Our air line and our power wire go over our crossmember here for our frame, and you can see where we're hooking up our air line right here. We'll measure off about how much we need, and we'll cut off the excess, and we'll plug our air line into our fitting, making sure we have a nice secure and tight connection. Our power wire will now secure back along our frame a little bit more and get it closer to our compressor. Now, our red wire's our power wire for our compressor. We'll cut off this spade connector because we're not going to use it. You're supposed to use a butt connector, so I'll measure off about how much wire we're going to need to make our connection. You can have a little bit of slack in it. It'll be okay. That way we can secure it up out of the way. We'll strip off our wire. We used one of the heat-shrink butt connectors that comes with it. With that secure, we'll use our heat gun, and we'll secure the butt connector. Now, we'll take one of our nuts off that we have our compressor mounted with. We'll place our ring terminal on the bolt, and we'll reinstall our washer and lock washer. This'll provide us with our ground for our compressor. With that secure, we now have a nice, solid ground connection. We'll zip-tie up our remaining power wire here up away from our leaf spring hanger. Now, with all of our connections made and everything hooked up, we can put our key in our ignition and turn the key. First time you turn it on, the compressor will automatically turn on and put five pounds of air pressure in the system. We've already tested ours once off camera to verify everything was working. As you can see, we have five pounds of air pressure in the system. When we want to adjust our air pressure, all we have to do is press the Up button and hold it until we reach the desired air pressure we want. Let's go ahead and air it up to about 50 PSI. Now that we're at 50 PSI, if we want to let air out of the system, all we have to do is press the Down button, and you can feel and hear the air releases inside the vehicle. Now, we're at 40 PSI. That completes our installation of Air Lift Load Controller Compressor System for Air Helper Springs, part number AL25854 on our 2014 Ford F-150.