Video Transcript for How to Install the Demco Air Force One Second Vehicle Kit - 2026 Buick Encore GX

Hi, this is Scott with etrailer, and today we're taking a look at and installing the Demco Air Force One Second Vehicle Kit on our 2026 Buick Encore GX. We often get asked a lot of questions on what they're gonna need to get started on flat towing, and you're gonna have five main components that you're definitely gonna need. And those components are gonna be a base plate. You're gonna need a tow bar. You're gonna need tow bar wiring, safety cables, and some type of supplemental braking system. Another thing to take a look at is you may need a charge line kit.

Our Demco Air Force One is gonna be a stay-in vehicle kit. Now, what this is gonna be is gonna stay underneath of your hood, and it's gonna get all your lines and everything routed into your vehicle, and it'll stay in there. Now, a lot of times, people will get the portable style, and they go in and out of their vehicle all the time with it, and they're kind of a pain sometimes, but they're nice if you have a couple different vehicles that you're flat towing with. You can use that between both of those. Since our neighbor was just flat towing with this one, they decided to go with this system.

It keeps things simple for them, and it makes it easy to hook up every time they go out and they hit the road. Now, a couple things that come with your kit on the front of our vehicle: we're gonna have our air fitting that comes into the front. That's gonna connect from your RV, and that's what's actually gonna work your brakes. That comes with that. Now, it's gonna have a different bracket that comes with it that you can mount just about anywhere, but I set this up where everything was all in one little plate here with our plug-in for our tow bar lighting.

We went ahead and hooked that all up there. Now, it is gonna come with your breakaway switch as well, and we have this mounted up in here. And with ours, we did have a tab on our base plate where that is set up to get hooked up, and that tucks away nicely under the front of our fascia. Now, the part that's gonna actuate our brakes, we have our cylinder in here, and that's what's gonna be our actuator. That's what's gonna move our brake pedal.

And as you can see here, we have it all set up on our pedal itself, and we're gonna have air that runs into this, and that's gonna go through our control module, under our hood, into our firewall, into our cylinder, and that's what's gonna be doing all the work. Now, if you have any questions or comments about the Demco Air Force One set up for your Buick Encore GX, you can always leave a question or comment down below in the comment section, or you can get ahold of one of our experts here at etrailer. They'd be glad to help you out. Now, as far as installation goes, this one can be a little bit tricky. But now, if you plan on getting a whole setup done, or if it's something you don't feel like doing yourself, you can always take a look at our installer locator or get something done for you locally. Or if you feel like tackling it yourself, stick around, watch our video, and we'll help you get it installed. To start our installation, one of the first things we want to do is get figured out how we're gonna have our breakaway switch set up. And with ours, we we inchesre lucky enough to have a base plate that already had a tab on it, and so that was already set up. So all we did is we used the included hardware, and we mounted up our breakaway switch to our tab on our base plate. Now, another thing you're gonna want to consider with this being an air run system, you're gonna want to figure out where you're gonna get your fitting mounted up. Now, with this being an air run system, this is gonna have a fitting that comes with it, and you're gonna have this little bracket that it's gonna be on. Now, you can use this to install this wherever you want to have your fitting at. Now, I ran out of spots for this to go, and we already had little tabs that come out for our wiring to go to, and our neighbor had a bracket that they wanted installed with theirs. So what I ended up doing is just taking our fitting out of the supplied bracket. I ended up drilling a hole in our bracket that he wanted installed and just got everything installed in one clean little setup. And again, you can mount this up wherever you want this, depending on what side you want it. So yeah, this ended up being the cleanest way to get ours set up today. Now, to get our control box all set up, we're gonna need to do a couple things. In our kit, we're gonna have our little plug kit, and there's a couple things we're gonna need. And we're just gonna cut off about two inches of our hose that comes in our kit. Now, on this, since we're gonna have electric brakes on ours, we're not gonna have any vacuum to hook into. So we're gonna want to plug our vacuum side, and we're also gonna want to plug our exhaust side. So what we'll do is we need to go ahead and plug in our little cone. It's a little rubber cone that comes in our kit. Now, we'll take the nut that comes with that, and we'll just thread that onto there. That's gonna plug that off. And we just want to get that snug. We don't have to get that really tight. Just want that nice and snug. Don't want to strip that out. For our vacuum side, we'll take our two inch piece of hose that we cut off, take our plug, run that in the end, get that pushed down. Now, we'll just put that over our vacuum port. Now, we're up under our hood, and about the best place I found to get this installed will be right here on our box. That's gonna fit really nicely. Now, I'm just gonna use some hook and loop to get this mounted down, and I'll get it set up to where all they have to do is pull this off to get at their fuse panel here. So what I'll do is take off our protected backing. I already stuck the one side down. I'll get our box right where I want it to go. Now, I'll just push that down, and then we'll get that stuck in place. Now, in order to get our wires and our line for our air ran up, we simply ran ours across our base plate, tying it off, and then ran it up beside our radiator. Now, our fascia was completely off when we did that, and I recommend basically getting everything set up before you do that. Now, as we did that, we tied across the back of our base plate and ended up running up towards over here where our battery's at. Pretty much everything's gonna be set up in this general area. So we have our line that comes up and our wiring. Now, I did end up having to run an extension. So, as you can see here, we have white wire, and we have a black wire. Now, our black wire is our black wire that comes off of our breakaway switch. I just added some extra black wire onto that because I ran out of room for wiring to come up, so we just have an extension. Now, our white wire, that's going to be our orange wire that comes off of our breakaway switch. This is gonna be the one that's gonna go to power, and this one is gonna come up and go to our box. So, for now, we'll just let these sit off to the side. And as far as our line, we just came up with that following the same path, ran that up, and ended up coming over here towards our box. Now that we have our line up, I did go ahead and cut this off nice and clean. We have a nice 90 degree cut. Now, what I recommend when you do this is, if you're not using a line cutter like I used, just use a utility knife and just kind of look at it from the side. Make sure you don't have your line crushed, and make sure you have a nice clean 90 degree cut. So now that we have it up, I went ahead, and we have our box sitting here where I have it mounted in place. I went ahead and ran this on here with some hook and loop right under our fuse box. That's gonna give us enough room for everything and still be able to reach all of our connections. So now we're gonna have our air inside of our box. What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna take my line, and I'm gonna push that into my fitting. We'll go ahead and push that in as far as it can until it stops, and we'll pull in and out, make sure we have a good connection. Now, what we'll start to do now is take a look at our wiring. Here, we have two wires that come out of our unit. Now, these are basically, they're not gonna be really marked or anything, so what you can do is whichever wire you had coming up from your breakaway switch, you can run this to either one of these. It doesn't matter. One of these is gonna go to ground. One of these will go to our breakaway switch. So what I'll do now is I'm just gonna go ahead and get these set up and crimp together. For our ground that comes off of our box, since we have this really close to this area, we do have a ground terminal right here, and that's gonna be a 10 millimeter. All I did here is just crimped on one of our ring terminals from our kit, and now I'm just gonna go ahead, and we'll run our ground terminal back on, and we'll just get that snug down. Now, for our black wire that comes up from the front, we're gonna have our other wire that comes out of our box. We're gonna go ahead and get these connected. Now, I'm gonna be using heat shrink butt connectors on this. I do recommend using heat shrink butt connectors on any connections you make that are gonna be on the outside of your vehicle. These are gonna keep it corrosion free, and also, it helps strengthen the connection to when you heat these together. It's gonna make things hold together a whole lot better in the future. Now, what I like to do is get them put together, and we'll get them crimped. Then I'll come back with my heat gun, and we'll heat these up and get these shrunk down. Now, when we're doing this, what we're looking for is that to shrink up around our wire, (tool vacuuming) and we're gonna see most of the bubbles come out. That's what we're looking for. (tool vacuuming) And once we start seeing some of that gel coming out the end of our butt connector, that's when we know we have a good seal. (tool vacuuming) Now, to get more of our wiring done underneath of our hood, while I'm over in this area, what I did is I went ahead and grabbed our fuse holder, and I put a ring terminal that comes in our kit on the end of that, just crimped that, and I crimped on a heat shrink butt connector to our wire that comes up from our breakaway switch. Now, remember, this is considered our orange wire from our breakaway switch. Now, in your kit, you're gonna have some extra wire that's gonna be the red wire. What I need to do with this is I went ahead and got that run together with my breakaway switch wire, and then ran together into my fuse holder. This is going to be our power wire that's gonna run inside of our vehicle, and this is gonna go down towards our reed switch. So I went ahead and did that, and while I was at it, I went ahead and got another ground set up here, and this one is gonna run to the inside of our vehicle. Now, there are times when you can ground out to the inside, but I like to go to a known ground out here. We're just gonna make sure that we have a really super good ground. Now, before you start running everything in, I like to go ahead and get everything figured out, then I'm gonna run in. So these things I know: I know I'm gonna have to have a ground wire that goes in. I know I'm gonna have to have my positive wire that's gonna go in down towards my reed switch, and I know I'm gonna have some plastic line that's gonna run in there as well, and that's gonna go down to my cylinder. So now, what I like to do is we'll get figured out where we're gonna get into our floorboard area through our firewall, and then we'll just pull in all of our wires that need to go in or out all at the same time. Now, we're in the driver's side footwell of our vehicle, and we needed to get our cylinder put on our pedal. Now, in our situation with this one, we did have some issues getting that all figured out. As you can see right here, we have a big pocket in our foot well where we would normally mount our little plate to our firewall. Now, it's gonna come in your kit, and you're gonna have a plate with three holes in it, and you're gonna have three self-tapping screws. And normally, we just run these three self-tapping screws into that plate with our little mount for our cable. But in our situation, we had nowhere to go with that. In the center part of our footwell where it's all cut out, that's where our steering shaft comes down through. So I ended up having to make a bracket that went up and mounted to our floorboard over here and then extend it over to where we can make contact with our cable. In order to do that, I had a piece of steel laying around, and it was in an L shape. So I just ended up drilling three holes in it after I got it all laid out and figured out where I needed this to go. Now, I did utilize these areas down here and up here where this is two layers of steel, and this is a pretty tough stuff, so we did have to pre-drill through this instead of just running in with our self-tappers. So we did have to do a little bit of work getting in there, and then we just brought these down snug. Now, in this situation, we did end up drilling a hole on the end for a mount to go in through, and I just used a bolt and two flat washers and a lock washer, and I did run some blue Loctite on this nut to make sure everything stays put. Then after we got all that figured out, we went ahead and got our cylinder all lined up. Now, this is gonna come pretty much set up how it looks in your kit. You are gonna have the option of putting longer screws on here, but we didn't need that because our pedal was pretty thin. So after we got everything lined up, we went ahead and adjusted this where, when we go ahead and run our pedal, you can see that when we do that, our cable's gonna make a little bit of an arc. Now, with that, that's gonna allow through the swing of our pedal to basically pull our cable in a straight line once it gets to that point, but it's loose enough and has enough slack in it to where it will follow that arc. Now, all we did is just get it lined up where we wanted it and then tighten down our nuts for our cylinder. Now, after that, what we did is we ended up getting all of our wires ran in from our grommet up underneath here. All we did is found a spot where there was this little piece of extra grommet that comes out. We snip that off and just ended up running through this with, we have a special tool that we use to go through grommets, and it's basically just a hollow tube with a sharp end. So we ended up going through, being careful not to get into any of our wiring harness, ran that through. Then I was able to get all of my lines in that I needed to come in. So, with my white wire, I'm gonna have that as my ground. Our red wire is gonna be our wire for power to our reed switch and indicator light, and then this other wire is just for another accessory that we have coming in, and then we have our black line here. This is gonna be our line that goes to our cylinder for our pedal. What we need to do to get our wiring all done on the inside of here, we're gonna have our little light that we're gonna need to get installed. This is gonna be an indicator light that lets us know from our RV that our brake system inside of our vehicle is working. So what I want to do is I'm gonna apply this to our mirror. So right up here, I think will be a good spot right there on our mirror is where we're gonna end up putting that, but before we do that, we need to get our wire all routed. And to do that, I'm just gonna tuck that up in beside our headliner and just push that back. That should be fine staying there. And then I'm gonna need to run down our pillar. Now, I wanted to show you right here inside of our pillar, you're gonna see this white thing. That is our airbag. We do not want to run our wire in front of that. Wanna make sure that we have our wire running on the inside of that, and then it'll go behind that and then up and make its way over towards our mirror. Then we'll just run that down beside that. Basically, what that is, we don't want to impede that airbag at all, so after we do that, we'll run that down, and we'll get it up in, start it in back here behind our dash, and we'll get it down towards our footwell. Now, in order to get this to stick on here real well, what I like to do is take a little bit of rubbing alcohol and just clean off the back of our mirror where we're gonna be mounting that up and just get that good and clean. Make sure you don't have any kind of chemicals on there that's gonna affect that. And after we've done that, we'll pull off the protective backing. Once we do that, we'll go ahead and get that stuck to our mirror, get that stuck in place. Main thing, we want to make sure that it's gonna be visible from the RV. To get our wiring going, we're gonna have our wire that comes off of our cylinder. This is going to be our reed switch wire, and we're going to have our indicator light wire. What we want to look for is on here, we're gonna have a black wire, and on our brown wire coming off our reed switch, we're gonna connect these two together. So we're just gonna take some of our butt connectors in our kit, get those on the end. Don't cut off these ends because inside here's a really thin wire, and it don't want to bite into these, so make sure you leave the ends on these. Let's go ahead and get that on there, crimp that in place. Make sure you have a good bite on that, which we do. Now, we'll take our brown wire, pop that in our end, and we'll do the same thing. We'll just get that crimp down. Now, we have our blue wire that comes off out of our harness for our reed switch. That is gonna be our ground. We'll go ahead and get a butt connector put on that end. And this is gonna run right over here to our white wire, which we ran in from the front of our vehicle for ground. Now we have our red wire. That's gonna be our power. That's gonna be 12 volt. We have our red wire coming in from our battery. We're gonna go ahead and get those connected together using our butt connectors as well. With all these connected, I'll come back through, and I'll tuck away all of our wires. Now, we have our line. We're gonna need to get hooked up to our cylinder. So what I want to do is just make sure I leave a little bit extra on these. That way, I can kind of tuck this up under the dash here and then just have room for my line to move around. But one of the main things I want to do is make sure I get a good clean end. So I'll just go ahead and give that a snip, make sure I'm starting fresh. Give that a look. We have a good 90, everything looks clean. There's no crushes, and we'll just push that into the connector on our cylinder, make sure it comes to a stop, give it a little pull, and that looks like it's gonna be a good connection. I went ahead and hooked up our fuse holder up to our battery. With that, that'll be everything hooked up for our braking system. So what I can do now is just open up my fuse holder, and we'll install our included 10 amp fuse. And we'll go ahead and get our cover back on. And that was a look at the Demco Air Force One Second Vehicle Kit on our 2026 Buick Encore GX. I'm Scott with etrailer, and thanks for watching.