Video Transcript for Install: Second Vehicle Kit for Demco Air Force One Flat Tow Brake System on a 2021 Ford Ranger

Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today on our 2021 Ford Ranger, we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Air Force One Supplemental Braking System Second Vehicle Kit. So something that we run into quite often here at etrailer with customers flat towing their vehicles is a lot of times they have a couple of cars that they like to pull behind their motor home. Or they have a vehicle for a couple of years, sell it and get something new and they wanna flat tow that behind their coach. Well, the thing is if your coach is already set up for an Air Force One Braking System, it don't make much sense to change everything just to pull your vehicle. So a solution to that problem would be to use the second vehicle kit.

And what that's going to allow you to do is set up just your towed vehicle sign with those braking system components. That way you can hook it up to your motor home and pull it down the road safely without really having to change or modify anything else. So chances are pretty good. If you're looking into the second vehicle kit you're probably already familiar with how it works and some of the features, things like that. But just to be on the safe side let's say maybe you're new to flat towing and you purchased a motor home that is already equipped with the motor home side of the Air Force One.

Let's just go ahead and kind of touch base on some of the features that the second vehicle kit has to offer us. That way you can familiarize yourself a little bit with it. The Rangers brake pedal is going to be applied at the same rate that you apply the brake pedal up here in the motor home. So just to kind of give you an example on how that's gonna work, let's say if we're rolling up to a red light and you're kind of just halfway on the brake, you know just kind of pushing a little bit, Ranger's gonna do the same thing. On the other hand, let's say maybe there's an accident up ahead on the interstate, something like that.

And we really have to come to an emergency stop and really hammer on that brake pedal, Ranger's gonna do the same thing. So overall, it's gotta be really smooth and much more of a safe stop. A nice touch that I like is the fact that we have an indicator light on our Ranger. And so whenever the brake pedal is applied, we're hooked up to our motor home, we can see that light illuminate red. And that's just a very quick way to keep an eye on things and make sure that the brake pedals actually being pushed down in our Ranger when we're going down the road.

So at the end of the day, probably my favorite kit for motor homes that have air brakes. It's very solid and one you can count on which is really important when you're over the road. So to begin our Air Force One installation on our vehicle side, first thing we're gonna do is just route a couple of wires and an airline tube. And that's because we're installing this when we have our bumper removed. Because we did our base plate and everything else at the same time. So if that's your case, you definitely want to do this before you put the bumper back on, it can be done with the bumper on, it just a little more tricky. So what I did was take our airline tube 'cause this'll get plugged into our fitting eventually that'll be mounted to our bumper. And then I just took two wires that way if we need to extend our breakaway switch wires which will also be mounted here, which chances are good, we won't need to extend them. You have them right here. They'll be easy to work with and easy to hook up. So with that said, I just loosely routed everything, kinda alongside here kind of up and behind our headlight where it goes up into the engine compartment. And from there, we can kinda just let them hang until we're ready to get them hooked up. So now that we have our bumper on, you can understand a little bit better why we routed our airline tube and a couple of wires beforehand. With that said, once their bumper is on we can mount up some of our components. And the first one is gonna be the breakaway switch which is this right here. This is really straightforward. There's actually a factory pre-drilled hole in our bumper bracket, all right. And all I did was take the included bolt that comes with our breakaway switch, run it through the hole on the bracket, on our bumper beam and secure them. Now while we're right here, go ahead and get the breakaway switch wires hooked up. So there's gonna be an orange one and a black one. And all I did was connect them to those two extra wires that you ran down here earlier. So I put the black one from the breakaway switch to the black wire that I ran down and the orange wire from the breakaway, I connected that to the brown wire that we ran down and I just use some heat shrink butt connectors which you can grab in etrailer. The ones in the kit work just fine but I definitely prefer the heat shrinks to give us a lot more protection against corrosion things like that. But with that said, we can then hook up our air fitting. And all I did was straighten this bracket out. There's usually a 90 degree bend on the back of it. I straightened it out and drove a hole in the middle of it. Then actually just use the bolt that's holding on our a six way plug here to secure it to that bracket so I think it turned out really well. And we're right here as well. We might as well hook up our air line tube, all right. So this simply just plugs in to the back of the fitting and that's how all of these airline fittings are gonna work. But there is something you do need to pay attention to and that is the type of cut that's on the end of it. You want it to be nice and clean and straight. You don't want any burrs or anything like that. So what you wanna avoid is using a regular pair of snips. What you can you use is a razor blade, a tubing cutting tool. I like to use a tool like this. You just wanna make sure it's nice and crisp, no burrs or anything. And that's a really good example of how all of these cuts look when we plug them in. These are just quick connects. So you simply just push it right into place make sure it's seated. And that's really all there is to it. So as you know, we previously routed our couple wires and our airline tube up into this area. And that's exactly where I mounted up our main operating unit. Pretty simple stuff here. I just use some self tapping screws and ran this into the core support. Nice and solid, not gonna go anywhere. With that said, the air line that goes to the front of our truck, you're gonna cut that the length and plug it into this fitting here just like we did the other one. That fittings gotta be labeled air end. And that's where the air from our motor home or coach is gonna come into our operating unit. With that said, we have our black wire, that extra one we ran. And I just used again, buck connector which I've yet to heat shrink and I will seal up the ends here in a moment but that's just gonna get connected to one of the black wires coming out of our main operating unit. It doesn't matter which one in our case I use the one closer to the top. Push it out of the way. The brown wire that came up, this is it right here. What you're gonna do is take the remaining length of brown wire, you should have about four or five foot left at this point. Strip back the ends and twist them together. And what we're gonna do in a moment is connect a fuse holder to this. But that said, we'll kind of just set that aside for now, and we'll move back to our operating unit. Let's talk about this other black wire that's coming out of it. This is simply just going to need to get grounded. And you've got to connect the ring terminal to it and utilize this factory ground right here. You're gonna pull that bolt out using an eight millimeter socket, put the ring terminal over the bolt and simply tighten it back down. Let's go ahead and move on to our brown wire here that comes from our breakaway switch. Once you have these tunes tied together, you're gonna take one of your butt connectors, put it over both ends and if you're gonna crimp it down, the other end is gonna get connected to the included fuse holder. So this is our fuse holder. Make sure the fuse is not installed. I already went ahead and strip back the installation and crimped on a ring terminal. We're gonna strip back the other end, expose that bare wire underneath, that is gonna get plugged into the other end of that box connector there. Go ahead and crimp that down. We'll come back with our heat source and seal up the ends. Now we need to do is find a spot to hook up our ring terminal here on the positive side of our battery. I'm gonna choose a stud right here, just 'cause there's no wires or fuses, anything like that going to it so kinda isolate that one. We'll remove that nut using a 10 millimeter socket. Slide over the ring terminal, simply tighten it back down. Now, let's go ahead and focus on getting our vacuum line hooked up to our main operating unit there. We're first gonna do is take one of the check valves and maybe enter two long piece of included hose. Put the black end of the check valve into the hose. This is push in through barbed, the hose isn't gonna come off very easily at all. We're gonna take the big length of hose, put that on the other end like so and then this side is gonna plug on-site barb fitting on our operating unit. All right, you wanna make sure that the black portion of the check valve is gonna face towards the operating unit. So go ahead, get in there and slide it on. Now, we can do this kind of prepare all of our other fittings and lines that way we can tap into our factory vacuum line. It's just easier to kind of piece everything together like this as opposed to trying to do it one by one, you know, bent over in the engine compartment. So to make things easier, I'm actually using this adapter fitting and this end will plug directly into the brake booster. I suggest using one of these, we actually sell these here at etrailer. They look a little bit different but the concept is the same and they work exactly the same. So what we're gonna do this side here with the seal is gonna go to our brake booster. So we'll leave this empty. This T fitting, this one comes out of here, that's eventually gonna plug into that long three eighth line that we ran off of our operating unit. And this side will connect to our factory vacuum line. So with that said, what we're gonna do is use a piece of hose, this is a larger piece of hose. You will have to pick it up separately. I believe this is eleven-sixteenths id in diameter. You can grab this at your part store. And honestly, you only need about a foot of it. And we're gonna slide this on this end here, take one of the hose clamps loosely put that over it for now. And then we can grab our other check valve, all right And this needs to go in the hose. Well, the check valve is way too small. We're never gonna get a good seal on it. So what I figured out is if we cut it maybe about half-inch piece off our three eighth line, put that over the check valve on both sides. That'll fill up that difference. So now we can slide that over. When we put this in, you want the white portion of the check valve face the base of brake booster. Black portion of the check valve to face towards the engine. So that'll slide on like so. I'm gonna use our clamps here just 'cause those aren't barb fittings like the other ones have more of a chance of coming undone. Then I'm just gonna take maybe a few inch piece of this larger line. Again, push that over. Take our hose clamp and put that on as well. Now with this as a unit it's gotta be much easier to get installed. So I'll snug these up a little bit. You don't need to be crazy tight and we can go to our factory line and get this random place. Now, if you look here on our brake booster, that's the line that plugs into it, the factory line. A lot of times you can just kind of pull on it get it to pop out. May need to take a flathead screwdriver, something to pry behind there. And what I did too, there's a plastic push pin fastener that kind of holds this assembly. I pried that out too, that way we can actually move it around and have some room to work. So when it's gonna work, we'll take our fitting assembly there. This is get a plug in to our brake booster. So once you get that pushed in, what we can do is just kind of eyeball where we need to cut our factory line. I think I'm gonna go right here in this area and play it safe. You can always cut a little longer than you think 'cause we can always come back and trim more off if need be. But you know, we can't really add hose so we'll give this area a shot first. This is going to plug right in. All right, so I went ahead re-outed that lengthy hose from our main operating unit over to the T, cut out the length and simply push it over that barb fitting. So earlier we talked about routing the length of the brown wire inside the cab of our Ranger. We can do that now but while we're at it, you might as well route the nine on air tubing in there as well. So again, you could've want a length of this. The tubing that's inside of the Ranger is gonna get plugged into our main operating unit here into this fitting and that'll be air out. That's what it will be labeled. But I just took the same path for our tubing in our brown wire, just kind of ran it along the side here. And it kind of just comes behind this area. You can see here's where our tubing comes up there and our brown wire and the way I got them inside is there's actually some factory grommets. Little tricky to see from out here, but actually pretty easy to see from the inside. They're solid. And so you will have to take a drill bit and just kind of punch a hole through them. And those are what I use to route our air tubing and the brown wire inside under the dash. So now underneath the dash here on our driver's side just to give you a better view, this is where airline tubing and our brown wire came through. So the airline tube is going to route to an actuator cylinder that we're gonna bolt up on our brake pedal arm. And the brown wire is more or less gonna run to the same place. There's it's gonna be a switch on that actuator cylinder that the brown wire is gonna connect to. So here's what our actuator cylinder looks like. And this is relatively straight forward. The first thing you're gonna need to do is take that switch I talked about this is called the Reed switch, and this just slides into this little housing here. And you use a small flathead screwdriver just to barely snug down that bolt. You don't need to crank on it or anything. You just wanna keep the switch from moving around. From there, you're going to take the whole actuator cylinder itself and use the clamp that's on it to bolt it around your brake pedal arm. We are then going to have a cable that comes off of the actuator cylinder that runs down to an anchor that gets connected to the firewall as opposed to drilling new holes in the firewall and everything else, I figured I'd utilize his factory stud right here. This was originally kind of like a plastic nut that just kind of held down the carpet. But since we had to cut the carpet out anyway give us an area to bolt everything up. I figured why not use this So I just found a flange nut. This has not come included, but the thread pitch is gonna be an M six by 1.0, so you can grab that from hardware store or something and tighten it down. And what we're looking for, you want this cable to be nice and straight with the actuator cylinder so give you an example, if I push down on the brake pedal and pull back on that cylinder that you see that cable's nice and straight, we're also gonna want a little bit of slack in that cable. We wanna be able to move the cylinder around a little bit. Oh, it's not super tight. And to accomplish that on the bottom of that anchor, It's hard to see, but say around the bottom of it there's gonna be a four millimeter hex head set screw. And so you can tighten the cable up or loosen up. Once you find the desired tension you can just snug down that hex head set screw and that'll keep everything in place. So once you have the tension set, the way you want it, you can hook up the airline tube that we routed inside here, cut it to length, nice and clean and plug it right in. With that said, there's gonna be some wires that come off of our actuator cylinder. All right. Off of that reed switch. This kind of got them loosely hanging in here right now. And we're gonna need to hook these up. We're just gonna use some butt connectors to do that. All right, so the black wire from our reed switch is gonna get connected to the red wire from our indicator light. I haven't showed you where I put that yet but we can kind of run through it backwards and get it hooked up. So black wire from the reed switch, red wire to the indicator light. We'll then have the brown wire from the reed switch that goes to that brown wire that we ran inside of the cab here. Last but not the least we're going to have the blue wire from the reed switch. That's gonna get connected to the black wire from our indicator light. And we're also gonna put in at least about a foot and a half two foot piece of wire, put in an extra piece of wire there and that one side of the butt connector and that's gonna be a ground. So that's this black wire here. Where I grounded that, we pull our dash down here. This pops down, just routed that wire right up through this opening from the ring terminal, hold out this bolt using an eight millimeter socket and re-secured it. And that provides us with that ground we need. So now we can go over our indicator, light wires. So the small red and small black one they run for a little ways. And then eventually turn into this. They're in like one big sheathing here. It makes a little bit easier but what I did just run them right up through here and you kind of just sneak it right behind your kick panel. And if you just pull off this weather stripping a little bit you can actually just use that channel to route our wiring up. So just continues along behind the weather stripping through there. And once we get to this pillar, which you can do kind of just peel this back a little bit, just kind of sneak that wire in there and then you can just tuck that wire above your headliner and in between the glass and just feed that all the way through. We're gonna have this plastic piece here in front of our mirror. Again, you can kind of just sneak it in that opening there. And right here on the front side of this plastic is where I stuck the indicator lights. So this is simple. Some two sided sticky tape, peel it off, make sure the surface is clean and just push it right in the position. So now that our vehicle has everything hooked up what you're gonna go ahead and do is install the included fuse into the holder like so, and close up that cap. Now we can hook it up and test it out. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Air Force One Supplemental Braking System on our 2021 Ford Ranger..