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This proportional brake controller is designed to keep towing simple. Includes an LED braking indicator, a slide-bar manual override, and a knob to adjust braking power. Mounts easily within a 90-degree vertical range.
Features:
Specs:
Once the brake controller is installed, you can use the knob on the right side of the unit to adjust the gain (also known as output). Gain lets you set the maximum amount of power that will be applied to your trailer's brakes. You want to set it as high as you can without locking up the brakes. Typically, this setting is only readjusted when you experience changing road conditions or if you switch over from a heavy, loaded trailer to a much lighter, empty trailer, or vice versa.
You can fine-tune the gain by adjusting the sensitivity of the internal sensor using the knob on the left side. This controls the aggressiveness of your trailer's braking, meaning how quickly the brakes reach the maximum braking level. You can adjust this when you're towing heavy loads and you need more umph to bring your trailer to a stop. Your tow vehicle doesn't need that much power to brake in time, but your heavy trailer does. A high sensitivity level will get the braking power to your trailer brakes faster and with more intensity so that it doesn't push your tow vehicle forward.
LED Indicator
Keeping with its simple design, the Voyager will not overwhelm you with information. An LED indicator on the top of the unit lights up green to show that your trailer is securely connected to your tow vehicle. The LED indicator will change to red when the brakes on your trailer are activated.
During installation and setup, this light is also used to ensure that the Voyager will be able to function correctly. Proper leveling of the internal sensor is crucial to the operation of this brake controller. When the sensor is level, the LED will change to a shade of orange.
The Voyager is designed to be mounted in your cab at a vertical angle that is between -20 degrees and 70 degrees. The brake controller needs to be horizontally level and parallel to the direction of travel in order to function properly.
To connect the Voyager, just plug the included harness into your vehicle. The other end plugs into the controller - no hardwiring required.
Once the controller is mounted and connected, you must level the internal sensor. First, set the overall power to the maximum using the knob on the side of the controller. Then, while pressing the tow vehicle's brake pedal, adjust the level knob on the other side of the brake controller (this is the same knob that is used to fine-tune the power output) until the LED monitor is a shade of orange.
Note: If you don't already have a 7-way plug at the back of your vehicle, take a look at our exclusive 7- and 4-way brake controller installation kit (ETBC7 - sold separately).
The Tekonsha Voyager brake controller comes equipped with proportional braking to give you the best towing experience. Proportional braking means that your trailer brakes mimic your tow vehicle's brakes. If you slam on the brakes in your vehicle, your trailer brakes will activate with the same intensity; if you brake lightly, your trailer brakes lightly too. The trailer's braking is in proportion to your vehicle's braking. This saves wear and tear on the tires and the brakes on both your vehicle and trailer.
The Voyager uses a pendulum system to sense how your vehicle is braking so it can send the right amount of braking power to your trailer. It measures the inertia of your tow vehicle and activates the trailer's brakes to slow at the same rate. The result is uniform braking across your towing setup. No push-pull action - just smooth, proportional braking every time.
Alternate Instructions
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Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Today on our 2014 Ford F150, we'll be installing the Takonsha Voyager Brake Control for 1 to 4 axles, part number 39510. We'll also be using the etrailer ETBC7 installation kit for brake controllers. With our power hooked up to our battery and our trailer hooked up to our brake controller, you can see we have a green light there. That means we have power going to our brake controller. This is our pendulum adjustment so when you level out your brake controller, you'll adjust that, and your power adjustment is on the side here. When you use your manual override, it will go from green to red so you know it's working. As you see, our truck is equipped for a 4-flat here on the back of the vehicle, and it is in a bracket. We're just going to go ahead slide that out of the bracket and tuck it behind our hitch, that way we can start to install our 7-way plug.
We'll go ahead and tuck it back here. Now, we need to go ahead and mount our 7-way here to the back of our vehicle. It does some with a bracket. As you can see, it's at a 90 degree angle and there's no where to mount it right here. We're just going to go ahead and bend this flat in a vice and go ahead and mark our holes right here, drill 2 holes, and then, we can mount our bracket and our 7-way here to the back of our truck.
We're going to go ahead and hold it up here against our bracket from the factory, mark our holes, and then go ahead bring our bracket down and drill out 2 holes. Now, we'll go ahead and take out bracket, feed our wires through it, and feed our 7-way to it. It does come with the necessary hardware needed to attach it. Just run the bolt through, loosely install the nut with the star washer built into it, get all 4 of those started, and then tighten them down. Now that we have those hand tight, we'll go ahead and take our small flat-bladed screwdriver and tighten these down. Now, we'll go ahead and bring out bracket up, line it up with our holes, and put our hardware through.
As you see, it's is angled out a little bit. We're going to go ahead and turn this out just a tad so it will fit flush up against here and clear our hitch. Now, we can go ahead and tighten those down. As you can see, nice and secure here on the back of our truck. Now, we can start with out wiring. Here's our 4-flat coming from our 7-way connector that we just put on, and we will be plugging it in here into the factory 4-way.
As you can see, the Ford 4-flat here is pretty thick. We're going to go ahead and trim back the rubber on this just so we can get a good connection. You see here that it exposes the terminals, and we can plug in our 4-flats together. We're going to use some dielectric grease, part number 11755, just to protect our connections from corrosion over time. All you have to do is put a dab on each terminal, and then, we can go ahead and plug them together. Press them in nice and tight, and we're actually going to go ahead and run a zip tie around this connection just to hold into place as another layer of protection to hold everything together. We'll trim off our excess zip tie, and then, we're going to go ahead and wrap that up with some electrical tape just to give it another layer of protection. There is a factory dust cap here that comes with the factory wiring. We'll just go ahead and snip that off as we will not be reusing it. Now that the connection is nice and secure, we can go ahead and work with our purple and white wire. Our purple wire will now be use . That's usually used for the reverse light circuit on your trailer. In this application, we will not be using it. The white wire is just the ground. We'll find a nice suitable location for the ground and attach it to the frame with a self-tapping screw that comes with our installation kit. Now before we run our wires, we're going to go ahead and wrap the bundle up with some electrical tape to clean up the install look and to protect the wires here at the rear of our vehicle while we still have access to them. Then, we'll go ahead and wrap the rest up once we make our final connections. Now, we'll go ahead and ground our white wire. We'll take our white ground wire that has the ring terminal on it and feed it up here over the frame just so we have some attachment points here, and we're going to ground it right here to our frame. We'll go ahead and use the larger self-tapping screw that comes with the kit and run that in. Now that that's attached, we can go ahead and make our final connections here to our black and blue wires. Now, we'll go ahead and take our gray duplex cable that come with our ETBC7 kit, and we're just going to go ahead an split the sheathing off here at the very end so that we can get access to our black and white wires on the inside. We'll go ahead and trim off that. Now, we're going to go ahead and strip the wires back here. We can go ahead and take this to the back of our truck and make our connections. Before we make our connections to our blue wire and black wire, we're just going to go ahead and snip this purple wire short. We'll go ahead and bring our duplex cable in. The black wire will go into the black wire coming out of our 7-way. We'll feed that into our butt connector. We'll go ahead and get a good crimp on those. We'll pull back on it to make sure you get a good connection, and then, our white wire will go into our blue wire. Eventually, our black wire will get ran into our engine compartment for our 12-volt and our white wire, which is connected to the blue wire, will get ran back inside and will connect to the blue wire on our brake controller, and that will be our brake signal coming from the brake controller back to our 7-way and to the trailer. Make sure you get a good crimp on those. Now, we'll go ahead and wrap these connections up with electrical tape along with the rest of our bundle. Now that we have everything wrapped up, we'll go ahead and use some zip ties. Now, we'll go ahead and take the other end of our duplex cable, run it up here over the frame and give it one more zip tie, and then, we can start running it down the length of our vehicle. Now, we'll go ahead and trim our zip ties off to clean up our install look. Now as you see here, we ran our duplex cable inside the frame. You can take a stiff piece of wire or a coat hanger, you can run it into your frame and then tape the duplex cable through it. You can run it all the way down the frame up towards the front wheel. As you can see, we came out of the frame right here in this hole, and then, we're going to follow this factory wiring harness into the engine compartment. You always want to stay away from any moving components such as suspension or any excess heat such as the exhaust or the engine when you get into the engine compartment. We'll go ahead and just attach a couple zip ties here to hold our wire up, and then, we can go up into the engine compartment and continue our installation. I'm just going to take a razor knife and cut down the middle of the sheathing. You just want to be careful when doing this. You want to split it from as far down as possible when you have it ran inside to the very end. Our black wire will go over to the driver side of the engine compartment and then our white wire will get ran inside through the firewall. Now before we connect our black wire to our battery, we're going to go ahead and run it through one of the breakers that comes with our kit. You'll get a 20, 30, and 40-amp breaker. The 40-amp breaker will be for our 12-volt power. Our black wire coming from the rear of the vehicle to the front will go into that here on the silver side, and then, it'll have a jumper wire coming from the copper side to the positive post on the battery. For the brake controller power, we'll be using the 20-amp breaker that comes with our kit, and we'll run the power wire from our brake controller back out through the firewall, through the silver side of our breaker, and then have a wire coming from the copper side to the positive side of our battery. We'll go ahead and use self-tapping screws here. I'm going to go ahead and attach these to the firewall right here. Now, we'll go ahead and overlap the middle connections points for our breakers and install our 2nd one. Then, we'll go ahead and install out last one, and now, our breakers are nice and secure here on the firewall. Now, we'll go ahead and run the black wire over here. We'll zip tie it to the firewall where we can, and then, we'll connect it to our 40-amp breaker here and then make our wire coming from the copper terminal her to the battery. We won't hook our connection up yet, but we will just run it over here because hooking it up to our battery will be the last step in installing our brake controller. Now, we'll go ahead and measure our black wire out, and it's going to this 40-amp breaker right here. Make sure you give yourself enough and cut the excess wire. Hold onto the wire as we will be using it going from the copper terminal to our battery. We'll go ahead and strip back our black wire and add on one of the small ring terminals that comes with our install kit. Make sure you get a nice crimp on that, and then, we'll take the nut off the silver terminal and install it onto there. We can go ahead and re-install our flat washer and our nut once we get our ring terminal onto our stud. Now that we have that one on there loosely, we're going to go ahead and take that piece of black wire that we have excess of, trim back one side, put another small ring terminal on it, and attach it here to the copper post. We'll add on our wire and re-install the star washer and nut. Now that we have that one loose, we can go ahead and follow the factory wiring here around the battery, hold it in place with some zip ties, measure it out to our terminal we'll be using, trim it back, and add our larger ring terminal. Once we make all of our connections, we'll be able to hook up our power wire. Now, while we're over here with our breakers, we're going to go ahead and make our wire connection that goes from the copper terminal for our brake controller over to the battery also, so we can get that out of the way. Now since we don't have enough extra duplex cable to run from our brake controller back outside to the engine compartment, we're going to bring in about a 10-foot piece of it, which we do carry on our website. That part number is 10-2-1. That's the Deka jacketed 2-wire 10-gauge brake wire. Now that we have our extra piece of duplex cable, we're going to go ahead and strip this back again like we did the first piece that way we can make our ground wire for our brake controller and our jumper wire from our breaker to our battery. Now that we have our duplex jacket stripped back, we're going to go ahead and take the piece that we stripped back and expose the 2 wires, and we're going to go ahead and cut the black wire here back to where we stopped stripping it back. We'll go ahead and snip our black wire, set our duplex cable aside, and we'll strip both ends of this black wire, put a small ring on one end and a large on on the other. The smaller ring terminal will go our breaker, and the large one will get ran towards the battery. We'll go ahead and take our small ring terminal we just attached, attach it here to our 20-amp breaker on the copper side and then run our larger ring terminal over with the other one towards the battery. Now, we're taking our larger ring terminal, run it like we did our other one towards the battery, and then we can go ahead and zip tie those wires off once we make our connections here to our positive side of our battery. Now, we'll go ahead and take our extra length of duplex cable that we just trimmed off the excess and run that over towards the driver side of our vehicle. The black wire will be the power wire from our brake controller. We'll go ahead and strip that back, put a small ring terminal on it, and it will go here on the silver post, and our white wire will be our ground. We'll just keep it here in the sheathing with the black wire run enough around and eventually connect it to the negative post on our battery. Now that all of these connections are made, we'll go ahead and snug down the nuts for each one of them just to hold our wires up where we want them to be. Now that we have all those connections made, we'll go ahead and run our white wire around towards our battery and install a larger ring terminal on it once we get it trimmed to length, and that will be the ground for our brake controller. Then after that, we'll go ahead and take some zip ties and clean up our wiring here over on our firewall. Now, we'll go ahead and take our white wire that's connected to the blue wire at the rear of the vehicle and then our duplex cable that has our power and ground wire from our battery and run it into our vehicle. There's a big grommet that has a bunch of wires ran through it right here on the firewall. You can go ahead and pull that grommet out a little bit and allow you to get room to push this in next to it. If you put a little slit in the grommet, it will allow you to run it right next to it, and then, you can go ahead and take some silicone to seal it up. Then, you can inside, grab the wires, and pull them down. I'm going to go ahead and go back into the engine compartment and check to make sure we have all of our wire pulled in and then put our grommet back in place after we've trimmed it a little bit and then put some RVT Lock-Tite silicone on there to seal up the slice just to seal up any gap that we could have created by putting our wires in. Now, we're ready to bring our Voyager brake controller into our install. Normally, your brake controller would be mounted here, on the dash, or on the inside of the dash here on the kick panel. For this application, since the driver has extremely long legs, he doesn't want to kick it every time he gets into his truck, we're going to go ahead and mount it here on the dash and run our wires down here through this panel. If you grab this panel and remove it, you can see there's plenty of room here. We may have to trim just a little bit here at the top to get our wires ran through, but we will be able to run our wires right there. We'll put some loom on this to clean up our install look, but for this application and since we're running our wires like that, we're going to go ahead and cut this connector off and hard-wire our brake controller into our wiring system. We'll go ahead and do that now. To make our connections a little bit easier, I'm going to trim each one of them a little shorter than the next, that way our butt connectors will be staggered so we can get them as tight as possible when we do our bundle. We have our wires stripped back here. We're going to sit this aside for right now, and then, we're going to go to our brake pedal. We need to find the wire that gets power when the brake pedal is pressed. Now, we'll go ahead here to our brake switch, which is right here and connects to our brake pedal. Go to the top one. As you can see, the brake pedal is not pushed but it's getting constant power, so it's not that one. We'll go to the next one. It's a purple with a red stripe. Pull on the brake pedal and you see when the brake pedal is pressed that light comes on. That will be the wire we need to tap into. Again, that's the purple wire with the red stripe. We'll go ahead and trim back the plastic covering here just so we have a little more access and it's easier to make our connection with our quick-splice connector that comes with the ETBC7 kit. We'll go ahead and put our quick-splice connector end to it. We'll just get an extra piece of red wire that we have laying around, feed that into it, and crimp down our connection. Now, we'll just take a piece of red wire and run it into that connection. We'll go ahead and close that up, and now, we can take our 4 wires that we have ran and run them up here into the dash and out the opening on the side. We can start making our connections to our brake controller. Our of this opening, take our red wire we just ran and run it up with these. I'll go ahead and add butt connectors to each one of our wires on our brake controller. We'll go ahead and sit that aside for a second and trim our wires that we need to length. We want to go ahead and just leave a little extra as we have plenty of room to tuck the wire in right here and zip tie it up out of the way. You don't want to cut yourself short and then have not enough wire to run your brake controller up to your dash. We'll go ahead and just measure it out. We'll have plenty if we trim our wires at this length. We'll go ahead and strip back our wires, and we can start connecting them to our brake controller. Now, our blue wire coming from our brake controller will go into the single white wire that we ran from the back from 7-way blue wire up into our engine compartment, in underneath the dash, and to our dash. That will be the signal from the brake controller to our trailer. Next up will be the black wire coming from the duplex cable, and that will be the power wire for our brake controller. The next will be our second white wire coming from our duplex cable, which will be the ground for our brake controller. Our final wire will be the red wire coming from our brake light switch, which will signal the brake controller when we hit our brakes. Now that we have all of those connections made, I'll go ahead and wrap them up with some electrical tape just to clean up our install look and to bundle them up. We are also going to put a little slit here in the cover just so the wires can run nicely next to it so you can shut your door. We'll put a couple pieces of tape around, and that will hold it into position. Now, we'll go ahead and bring our bracket in, mount it to the dash, and then get our brake controller mounted. We'll go ahead and get a pilot hole started and that will make it a little easier because this is on a weird angle. Now, we'll go ahead and set our brake controller into our bracket and install the screws through the bracket and through the side of the brake controller. We'll go ahead and tighten our 2 screws here to hold our brake controller in place. Now, we'll take our trim piece and I'm just going to go ahead and trim the section right here with a pair of snips. I'll go ahead and score it here with a utility knife. We'll go ahead and hook up our ground wire for our brake controller first here on the negative post of the battery. Now that we have our ground hooked up to the negative side of our battery, we'll go ahead and come here to the positive post, bring in our 2 power wires, install those, bring our cover over, and cover up our terminals. We can go ahead and hook our trailer up and test our brake controller. Now with our brake controller hooked up and tested, that will do it for our install of the Takonsha Voyager Brake Controller, part number 39510, along with part number ETBC7 on our 2014 Ford F150. .
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