Blue Ox Tow Bar Wiring Kit

Video Transcript for Blue Ox Tow Bar Wiring Kit Installation - 2020 Jeep Gladiator

Instructor Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today on our 2020 Jeep Gladiator, we're gonna be showing you how to install the Blue Ox Tow Bar Wiring Kit. Before we get into that though, let's take a minute, check it out and make sure it's gonna work for you. Before we jump right in, I do want to address one of the biggest questions that a lot of people wonder when it comes to flat towing their vehicle, and that is what are the main parts I'm actually gonna need And there's gonna be a total of five of 'em. First one is the base plate. And by having this on your vehicle, it'll let you hook up your tow bar.

Tow bar is gonna be the actual link connecting your vehicle to the motor home. Then you're gonna have safety cables and these are just there in the events of an unlikely disconnect. They're gonna keep everything paired together. The fourth main part will be tow bar wiring, and this is just going to send the lighting functions from the back of your coach to the back of your Jeep. And last but not least, the fifth part is a supplemental braking system.

What this is gonna do is hit the brakes in your Gladiator whenever you apply the brakes in your coach, bringing you to a more predictable and safe stop. So here's a good example on how the wiring is gonna work. We got the left turn signal going, on the motor home and it's being sent back here to our Jeep and same's gonna hold true for the left turn, your taillights, and your brakes so you'll be all good in regards of, you know, staying safe and legal, and to compare this kit to one of the other ones available, the Roadmaster Diode Wiring Kit, they're both excellent choices. You know, I'm a big fan of the Roadmaster Diodes. I've used them for a long time, had a lot of good luck with them.

But with those, you know, you're actually gonna have to splice into your Jeep's factory wiring to get them installed and that's where this kit, you know, kind of separates itself. This setup is gonna be plug and play, such as plugs right into the factory style connectors, and makes things a little bit more simple, so if you're someone who isn't, you know, the most confident when it comes to wiring, this would definitely be a good solution for you. This particular wiring kit, it's going to come with a pre-attached four-way flat style trailer connector if you will. So this would be at the front of it, which could then plug into the back of your motor home and that's fine if you are just looking for your lighting functions, you know, chances are pretty good your motor home will have a seven way style connector on it. And if you're just wanting the lighting functions, you can get an adapter that'll go from seven to four and this'll plug in.

But you know, the way things are now, these six way round style connector is kind of the standard now if you will, like we have set up on our Jeep, and that's because they're just a lot more parts available for it, the style of cable is a little more reliable, at least in my opinion, and with this, if you're wanting to add other components like, say, a towed vehicle battery charge line kit, this is a style of socket that you're gonna need. So if that's what you're looking to do, you can always pick up what we're actually using here today. This is a Blue Ox Coiled Cable Kit. It comes with this as well as the six-way connector. And then you can always just cut this end off, and hook it up right to the back of your six-way. So this wiring, since it does just plug into the taillights, it's gonna be a fit for the Gladiators as well as some of the other Jeeps too, that share similar style connectors. So you know, it's always worth checking out if that's a situation you run into. But other than that, at the end of the day, a great choice, you know, being that it's plug and play, everything's straightforward, you're not splicing into your factory wires and and things like that. So really shouldn't run into a ton of issues if you're gonna be installing this yourself. But with that in mind, why don't we go ahead, pull into the garage and get started on and out. So you begin our installation, we're gonna be here at the back of our Gladiator, and first thing we need to do is get our taillights removed. So pretty straightforward if you drop the tailgate, we'll have two screws here and have an eight millimeter head, (tool buzzes) pull those out. (tool buzzes) And then the light, it's kind of tricky to see but inside of here, there's a little tab, so if you take a trim tool or a small flathead screwdriver, you kind of push in on it. So that's the piece there and that's pushing on, so that'll release and then you can kind of just pull straight back to pop this out. We'll need to unplug it so there's a connector and it's just attached to a piece of plastic, if you pull it off, gives you more working room, but there's a red tab here, you can push down on it, and then down in the middle of that tab and it should release. Sometimes it's super dirty and gets stuck. So it almost helps if you push down on the tab forward, push forward a little bit and then back, it seems to free up a little bit easier, but I'll set this light off to the side, and do the same thing for the other side of our vehicle. So what we're able to do now, we can take this T connector, this is the one that'll go over to the passenger side, it's a lot longer, the wire length is and our four-way flat wiring here, and since we're upgrading to a six-way, this will no longer be needed, and so to make things easier to route, I'm just going to, you know, cut it off. We'll get rid of our ground here 'cause we'll add that a little bit later. But what we're gonna do is take these wires and that T connector and drop this down into the taillight pocket so it comes out of the bottom and we'll just kind of feed all this wiring through here. So this is about where we want to be, you know, have a little bit of working room here with our wiring, but then this T-connector, so it's real short coming right off of our converter, one end is gonna plug into our factory taillight connector there, same way, and I'm gonna wait to put our taillight in, that way I can secure this. So I'm gonna get that done, put it right inside of here, and I'll show you what it looks like and how I did it. I was able to get this secured and that works out. There's a factory bundle, the wire that just runs along this edge, and I just use a zip tie to secure the converter to it, just kind of bundled everything up nice and clean. That way wires don't get hung up in any of these parts here. Can grab our taillight now, the other end will just plug right in, lock down that red tab, gonna tuck all of our wiring in here and simply just reinstall this the opposite way that we removed it. Moving underneath the vehicle, so we're still on the driver's side, this is where our wiring dropped down and I just use some zip ties to secure it and we're gonna start routing stuff. And when you route wires, do your best to avoid any hot or moving parts, use some zip ties along the way to keep it secure. But we're gonna focus on our T connector first. So that goes to the passenger side, just comes up through there, right through there, and goes over the top of our frame rail. From here, the wiring, it's gonna kind of disappear a little bit just because I have it running actually on top of a little beam that goes across that stops our spare tire from going up further. So it just runs all the way along through there. All right, and then it will go up and over the frame again and this is where it comes out and I decided to running up and then this pocket's big enough, you can take your hand and kind of push that connector up in through there. If you can't get it, you can always drop a coat hanger or a piece of wire or something down, tape the connector to it and pull it up into place. Up top over here on the passenger side, this is where our wire runs up, set up the same way as the other side, one end just plugs into the factory connector, the other end just plugs back into our taillight connector and we will get it reinstalled here. So now we're back underneath the vehicle on the driver's side here towards the back right where our wires came out. And now we can route our last wiring, you know, the brown, yellow, and green one towards the front of our vehicle, so it comes up along through here, and then kind of tucks up on top of our frame rail. And essentially I'm just following some factory wiring and brake lines and stuff, it's usually a pretty safe bet. So I've just got it running along through there. Kind of disappears for a second, but I just pushed it on top of all this stuff here, with the exhaust right here too, try to do your best to keep it away from it. So there where it goes, and just essentially follows the lines right up until here and the wiring is actually right there. So my thought was there's this protective heat shielding. I did my best to kind of tuck it behind there and just zip tie it, that way we can get the benefits of this heat shield as well since our exhaust is right through here, just run it all the way through. And then in this area, that's where I push the wiring up into the engine compartment. You know, it's pretty open, you can usually get it up there. If not, you can always, you know, drop a coat hanger down or a piece of wire and tape it and and pull it up into place. Up here in the engine compartment, this is where our wiring comes up, all right, and if you remember, since we're not utilizing the four-way that was originally on this, we cut it off, we lost that white wire, that ground function. So we're gonna be adding one. With that in mind, you know, you only need to do this if you're gonna be upgrading to the six-way round. If you're gonna be utilizing that four-way flat, and it's still attached to the end, you don't have to do this right I mean you'll have to ground it, but you won't have to do it like how we're gonna do it. And with that in mind as well, you know, if you're gonna be doing other flat towing components and you're gonna have some wires that need to run down to the front of the Jeep or ones that also need grounded, now would be a good time just to do it all at once and kind of think things through and only have to route stuff one time, so with that said, I have a white wire here and it's probably 6' or 8' long, something like that, and that's what we're gonna use as a ground. These other two are for, like I said, our braking system stuff that we'll just do it the same time. So what you can do is strip back the end of the insulation, give that wire twist, and since I'm doing it with my other grounds here, I'm just going to tie all three of 'em together. Firstly, I like to have all my grounds in one spot. That's kinda what I like to do it this way, just so everything's organized, you know where it's all at. We twist 'em together. I'm gonna use a larger ring terminal there, crimp it on. And where we're gonna hook this up, it's right here in this corner. Alright, so there's a stud there that'll work out real well for ground. So we can remove that nut with a 10 millimeter, just kind of tight in here but that's all right. Get that nut out of the way. Slide our ring terminal over the post there, and we'll just tighten this back down. (tool buzzes) Continuing to route our wires, you know our green, yellow, brown, and that new white one that we added, that's just gonna run along through here and drop straight down to the bottom front side of our Jeep. So here's where wiring comes through and like I said, here's our six way, the red wire, that's unrelated, that's for a charge line, which if you're gonna be installing a charge line, probably do it now since you'll be in here, but we'll take our wires, feed 'em through our bracket and through our dust cover there. And then we can carefully cut in between 'em to separate 'em, pull 'em apart a few inches, and what I usually like to do, straighten 'em back out and cut off, I don't know, maybe a half inch or so just to give us a fresh start in case we nicked any while we we're separating 'em. But what you're gonna want to do is strip back the insulation a little bit and give that wire a twist. So I'll do the same thing for these three remaining ends here. On the back of our connector plug, they're gonna be labeled so this one's TM for taillight, so the brown wire goes there. This one is GD for ground, so the white wire goes into it. This one is LT for left turn, so the yellow wire goes there, and then that one will be RT for right turn, so the green wire plugs into it. So the way these style work, you just take a small Phillips screwdriver, back that set screw almost all the way out, and then take the appropriate wire, place it into the terminal, and just tighten on that set screw. We will just work my way around until we get 'em all hooked up here. Here's what our wiring looks like once we have it all hooked up. And something I like to do later on is come back and fill this all up with silicone so it stays sealed and we don't have to worry about corrosion in the future, but I like to wait till the very end of everything, that way we know everything's working and and whatnot. That way if we do have to get back in here, it's not a huge mess. So for now, we'll just temporarily put our cap on and go ahead and pull our screws out, and just loosely mount this out. Got that loosely mounted up and what we can do now is test everything to make sure that it works properly. To test everything, I have a test box here, which is simulating a motor home. You can use your RV but keep in mind if your coach has any issues, might mislead you into thinking it's something you did on the Jeep side. But with that in mind, we'll go ahead and run through all our signals. Go ahead and turn on our taillights, we'll try our left turn signal, our right turn signal, and our brake lights. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Blue Ox Tow Bar Wiring Kit on our 2020 Jeep Gladiator.