Video of Tekonsha Prodigy P3 Trailer Brake Controller w/ Custom Harness - Up to 4 Axles - Proportional
Video Transcript for Installation: Tekonsha Plug-In Wiring Adapter for Electric Brake Controllers on a 2013 Ford Explorer
Speaker 1: Today on our 2013 Ford Explorer, we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Takonsha Prodigy P3 trailer brake controller, part number 90195. We'll also be using universal installation kit for trailer brake controllers, part number ETBC7.This is what our brake controller looks like when it's installed. This is gonna be a proportional brake controller. This is gonna allow you to adjust your brakes on your trailer. This is gonna be your gain. It goes up to 14, down to zero.
This is gonna allow you to set your braking power on your trailer to the exact amount of pressure that you want, per the load that you're carrying. This is gonna be your menu button. This is gonna allow you to set your display, your brightness, contrast. This is your boost level. You have three levels, and you have your override button.
The override button is gonna allow you to apply the brakes to your trailer only without applying the brakes to your vehicle. The proportional side of this brake controller, what that means is your brakes on your trailer are matching the brake pressure in your vehicle. When you apply the brakes in your vehicle, the brakes in your trailer are being applied, and that pressure is being matched.Now, what's good about this brake controller is inside the menu, you have the option to store several different trailers. So, you have different size trailers, different weights, you have that option to set it so you can just go back in, set it on whatever trailer you're pulling, and this is automatically adjusted to it.First thing we're gonna do to start our installation is you're gonna have your seven and four pole wiring, we're gonna take our bracket that comes with it and we're gonna mount it on to our seven pole first. You're gonna put a screw in each corner.
We're gonna start with one side, and you're gonna have a nut with a star washer, put it on the backside. I'll do that with these two corners. Go ahead and take a flathead screwdriver. You want to make sure you don't tighten them too tight. You don't want to crack this plastic housing.We'll mount our seven pole on our bracket.
Now, this bracket doesn't come with your kit, but you can find one on our website, part number 18140. In our kit, you're gonna get some small screws, small washers, because this is so close to the bumper, we're gonna take the screw and go up from the bottom and put one screw in here. We can use a flathead or a Phillips screwdriver. Go ahead and tighten our screws up.Next we're gonna take our duplex wire. You want to split it right down the center. I'm gonna trip my black wire. I'm going to add a heat shrink butt connector. These don't come in the kit, but you can find them on our website. I'm gonna take this black wire and the butt connector that's on here, I'm gonna cut it off. I'm gonna strip this black wire. Then we're gonna add the other end of the heat shrink butt connector onto our wire coming from our plug. The purpose of this is this is gonna be outside the vehicle, and it's gonna help protect this connection and keep it from corroding.Then we'll just take a heat gun, shrink up our butt connector.So, next we're gonna mount our ground wire. Self-tapping screw that comes in your kit, you want to make sure you mount it to metal surface, not to any plastic.Next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna cut off our dust cap on our four pole. This four flat was already on the vehicle, so we have two options. You can take the four flat that was already on the vehicle, the four flat that's on the ETBT7, and you can connect them together, or you can cut both ends off and hard wire this together.First what I want to do is I want to take some dialectical grease and put it inside on my connections. We'll plug them together. I'll take a zip tie and run it through around both of them. Cut off our excess.Next what we want to do is we want to take that butt connector on our blue wire, we're gonna cut it off, and we're gonna connect this one the same way we did our black wire, only this is gonna go to our white wire in our duplex. Once you have your blue wire connected, we're not gonna be using the purple wire. We're gonna bunch all this together, put some wire loom on it.Once you've got all your wires cleaned up and attached your hitch back here, next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna run this to the front of the vehicle. You can do it any way you want. You just want to make sure you stay away from any heat sources or any moving parts.So, from back here where I attach it to the back of the hitch, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go up and over. We're gonna go over the hitch on the exhaust pipe right above here, back behind our panel. So, I ran over top of my hitch to stay away from my exhaust and you can see right here it went through the hitch, around this existing piping, just kind of looped it around, went over the top here, came down, zip tie here, ran it right underneath, couple zip ties along the way, back onto this existing piping, and you can see here I just wrapped it around to the front. I ran a zip tie around the loom here, and you can see I ran an airline tube down from my battery. So, then our white wire's gonna have to go to our brake connector which is inside on the driver's compartment, black wire's gonna be ran up top to the battery.So, what we need to do is we need to split the duplex off and you can see here I've taped my black power wire that's gonna be going up and connecting to my battery, I've taped it to my airline tube. Now when I'm ready, I'll go up top, pull my airline tube, and it'll bring my black wire up to me.So, now we'll put our airline tube up with our black wire connected. Now to mount this, what I'm gonna have to do is I'm gonna cut a little bit of piece of this rubber here so this is sit flat against there.Now we'll take our self-tightening screw and attach our circuit breaker. Once we have our circuit breaker mounted, then we'll take our black wire from underneath the vehicle and we're gonna cut it to size. It's gonna be going on the auxiliary side, which is the silver side, our silver post, and strip it. We're gonna add a small ring terminal, crimp it down. Place the nut. We just want to snug that up.Once you have this connected, you need to make a jumper wire that's gonna go from this copper colored terminal to the positive side of the battery. We're gonna strip both ends of our black wire. We're gonna add the large ring terminal on one side and the small ring terminal on the other.We'll take a 10 millimeter, we're gonna take this nut off right here on top on our positive side of our battery. I'm gonna run my power wire and replace the nut. Now inside the driver's side, what we're gonna do is we're gonna pull up this kick panel and if you have lights, you want to make sure that you don't pull on it. You're gonna have a wire that runs there. All we need to do is just set this out of the way enough to get underneath the carpet, and we're gonna have a plastic fastener right here. I'll just take a trim panel tool, we'll pull that out like that. This pad off, pull back our carpet, and we want to get to this ground right here. So, what I'm gonna do is I found if you push on it, this wire runs down and then drops down under the vehicle, so if you take your finger and you push right about here, it gets really soft. So, that means I don't have this wire running all the way to the back.So, I'm gonna just gonna make a small slice on here. So, I'm gonna take a piece of airline tube, you can use wire if you had some, we're gonna try and push it through there. I'm gonna actually take this and push it into the airline tube just like that. Now we'll just take a little bit of lock tite silicone. Just want to kind of cover this hole a little bit. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my wire and start pulling my carpet back down. I'm gonna make sure my wire's hanging out the top. Once you have that line ran, and you start putting your carpet and your panels back in place.So, now if we come inside the vehicle, driver's side underneath the dash, and our plug we're looking for is gonna be up underneath right behind our hood release. In order to get that, we need to remove this panel. You're gonna have two screws here. We're gonna take a seven millimeter socket and pull those out. Pull that panel off first. So, on this side towards the door, there's a plastic ring on top of this panel that's holding onto the screw or holding the panel onto the screw. You just want to reach up and pull down like that. On the center part of the vehicle, this lip right here is gonna be tucked up underneath the dash.Next, we need to locate the plug. Since we have a factory tow package, that's gonna be the plug we're looking for.So, now with our brake connector to make it an easier installation, having the factory tow package, we're gonna be using part number 3035. If you see this blue wire that's running through here, the white wire that we just ran inside, we're gonna have to connect it into that blue wire. This part is gonna connect into our plug right underneath, right behind our release button for our hood.So, what I'm going to do is I want to tie this in as soon to this plug as possible, but not so close that it's hard to work with. So, I'm gonna pull back this tape and I'm gonna do it right in this area. So, now I'll just slide this sleeve off and I'm gonna cut my wire right in here. I'll cut our wire. We're going to splice both ends, and we're gonna add a butt connector, and we're gonna take our white wire and cut it, and strip it, and we're gonna tie to the other end of our wire like this. Then we'll crimp our wire there, take the other end of our blue wire, crimp it down, and then we'll heat shrink that to hold our wires together.Once you have that done, go ahead and plug the brown side into our wire under our dash, and we can take this, cut it across, go ahead and put our bottom panel back in place. What we want to do is we're gonna go up over the top of this center section of the vehicle first. Kind of route this over like this.Next we can put our panel back in place. We're gonna start the bottom ones, we'll get those in first. We'll set our top ones in place, and we'll start slowly just pushing back in place like that.So, we need to find a good place to mount our brake connector. We don't want to go too low because then your shins hit it. You go too high, their knees are gonna hit it. I like to go in between top and bottom. So, about right there.So, I'm gonna take one of my self-tapping screws and go about center on the panel, and we'll take another one of our screws and go in through the side. Then we'll have one more that's gonna go on this side. It's easier to take this panel off, put it in place, and then we can put our panel back in place.So, now we'll plug our wire into the back of our brake connector, and you can see we have power. Now we can put our brake connector into our bracket, and then we'll just hide the rest of our wire here. Just kind of tuck it in back behind the dash.Once we're satisfied here, we got our wire tucked in where we need, go ahead and reinstall our screws in our panel.Now with an alternate power source, we'll test our lighting. Left blinker, right blinker, running lights, and brakes. It's gonna show that we're getting power from our brake connector to activate our brakes on our trailer, and that'll do it for a look at and installation on Takonsha Prodigy P3 trailer brake connector and ETBT7 on our 2013 Ford Explorer.
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