Video Transcript for Mount: Second Vehicle Kit for Demco Air Force One Flat Tow Brake System on a 2022 Ram 1500

Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today on our 2022 Ram 1500, we're gonna be showing you how to install the Demco Air Force One second vehicle kit. But before we get into that, why don't we take a minute, refresh yourselves on the main parts that we're gonna need to flat tow our Ram down the road in the first place and then we can check out the kit itself and make sure it's something that's gonna work for you. There's gonna be a total of five main components that you're gonna need. The first one will be your base plate and that's gonna provide us with a solid attachment point. That way we can hook our tow bar up to it.

Tow bar is gonna be the second component and that's going to be the physical link that actually connects the front of your vehicle to the back of your motorhome. Third main component will be your safety cables. And these are there in event of an unlikely disconnect. They're gonna keep everything paired together. The fourth main part will be your tow bar wiring and what this will do is transfer the lighting functions from the back of your coach to the back of your pickup, keeping you safe and legal.

And last but not least, the fifth main part will be a supplemental braking system. What this is gonna do is apply the brakes in your Ram whenever you hit the brakes in your RV, helping to bring you to a more predictable and complete stop. If you're watching this, you're probably somewhat familiar with the Air Force One braking system and how it works. So it's designed for motorhomes with air brakes and this particular kit, the second vehicle kit, is used in almost special situations, but we actually find ourself doing more and more of them as time goes on. And today's a perfect example of a situation you would use something like this then.

So the owner of the RV has had it for quite some time and the original vehicle that they we're flat towing was set up with the Air Force One kit. Will end up getting rid of that, but the motorhome still had all those Air Force One parts on it. And the new vehicle, instead of having to buy a whole kit again, since you don't really need it, since you already have the stuff on the motorhome side, get the second vehicle kit and that's gonna come with the parts that you need to just set it up on your vehicle side so that way you can utilize what you already have and get this set up with a proper braking system. Or if you have a couple of vehicles, it is called the second vehicle kit and you like to flat tow both of them on different occasions or or whatever the case may be, you can leave all your motorhome parts on, get these second vehicle kit, put it on another vehicle and then be able to interchange there and flat tow whatever one you're trying to take out. Something I do wanna mention that often gets overlooked is this kit is not gonna come included with the air hose here.

So if that's something you need, they are available. You can pick it up separately. And what's cool about this type of setup is there's so many different options. Almost regardless of your situation you're in, there's gonna be a solution for you. So like I said, this is just the vehicle side. But let's say if you need the whole kit, vehicle and the motorhome, you can pick that up or maybe your vehicle's set up already and you end up getting a new motorhome. Just the motorhome side is available too. So it really helps streamline things and gets you going in the right direction. Being that you're gonna be putting this kit on your Ram, I just wanted to show you the cylinder and how it bolts up to the brake pedal and it's actually a pretty good fit. Nothing too out of the ordinary there. You can put it up high enough to where your foot clears and everything else and the system will work with adjustable pedals. So ours has that feature and you wanna set it up with the pedal all the way out or closest to you. And as long as you do that, you'll be in good shape, but it has a good straight pull. And whenever you apply the brakes, the cylinder is gonna activate and push the brake pedal down. The kit is gonna come with an indicator light that you can put on your windshield essentially. Whenever you apply the brakes, it's going to illuminate red and that'll just let you know that the brake pedal arm is moving. You can upgrade to a wireless coach link, which will transmit that information to a device that you can keep inside of your motorhome if that's something you'd prefer. Other than that though, if this is a situation that you're in, it's gonna be a great solution for you to get your Ram set up and be able to flat tow it behind your motorhome safely. As far as the installation goes, this one it's really not too bad. You got a lot of room to work and there's not a whole lot of parts to this kit. So as long as you take your time, you should be in pretty good shape. If you'd like to see how that's done though, feel free to hang around. We'll go ahead, pull into the garage, and hook it up together now. To you begin our installation on our braking system, first we're gonna be mounting up the major components. The first one being the main operating unit. So I chose to mount ours over here on the passenger side, tucked back in the corner of our engine bay. So here's our operating unit. It turned out there's a real thick piece of plastic that run up right here and I just secured it to that using some self-tapping screws and it's pretty solid. You might be able to see this little pieces of metal. I did take a bracket and just run it from this side over to here just to give it some extra support. Probably you don't need to do that. It's just something I thought would make it a little bit better. So if that's something you wanna do, you can. But with that in mind, we can now move to the front end of our vehicle and mount up our breakaway switch and our air fitting. Over here on the passenger side, this is our breakaway switch and our air line fitting. We do have the front bumper and stuff removed and that's 'cause we're doing this the same time that we did our base plate. Just makes it a lot easier in case you're wondering, but our base plate happened to have some mounting locations or mounting tabs in it so to speak. Our breakaway switch just bolted right to it. Our air line fitting comes with this bracket and then I just used another piece of metal just a little bracket to get it exactly how I want it and bolted it all together. So that's really about it as far as getting it mounted up goes, but you're gonna have a black wire and an orange wire coming off the breakaway switch. This will get routed up until the engine compartment. And while you're doing that, you might as well route your air line tube up there as well. So this is the tube that's gonna plug into the fitting. Really the only thing you have to look out for with this is try not to kink it or make super sharp bends where it gets pinched and you wanna make sure that the cut is clean and straight. So you wanna use a tool like this or regular razor blade and push down on it straight and make tubing cutters as well. Avoid using regular pliers 'cause it'll kink it and then probably leak. So it felt pretty good. It's a good example. You don't want any burrs or anything on it, but the way that these fittings work and all the fittings, air line fittings are like this on the system. It simply just pushes right in. You'll feel it lock into place and that's really about it. So in terms of our tubing and our wiring getting ran, it just goes right up essentially right into the engine compartment there. The orange wire I had to extend it and so I just used a butt connector and a piece of extra wire to extend it. That'll eventually get routed over to the driver's side of our vehicle via battery. The black wire from the breakaway switch, I used a butt connector to connect that to one of the black wires coming out of our main operating unit. So you'll have two black wires coming out of our operating unit. Doesn't matter which one you connect to it as long as one of them is hooked up. And then the air line from the fitting in the front of our truck, you cut that clean like we talked about and then that is gonna get plugged into the main operating unit with that fitting that is labeled air in. While we're right here on our main operating unit, we can hook up the other black wire that's coming out of it and this is just gonna be a ground wire so it turns out there's some factory ground studs right here. It worked out really well. So I just crimped on a ring terminal and I'll show you how to how to do that here in a moment. But I crimped on a ring terminal, removed the nut using a 10 millimeter, put it on and tightened it back down. So I mentioned earlier that that black wire that we extended that's coming from the orange wire on our breakaway switch, I said that's gonna run over towards the driver's side via battery and this air line tube is also gonna run that direction so you can route these at the same time. So just take your air line tube, cut it clean, plug it into air out and start to route these over that way. I just wanted to give you an idea on where those are going and we'll get to those in a sec. But again, since we're right here, we might as well focus on this vacuum line. So there's a port labeled vacuum and there's just a fitting on it and what you can do is take a few inch piece of rubber vacuum hose, just slide it right over the port on operating unit there, then take one of the check valves and you want the black side to face towards the unit. So that just pushes right in. Super simple and then take another length of hose and push that onto the white portion of your check valve and that's gonna run over towards the center of your engine. So here's where this gets teed in. All right, so originally, from the factory there's just this little piece of vacuum line with this guy up here plugged into it. So if you unplug those two, they pull apart. What you're able to do is take the side close to the engine, that factory line, take your check with another check valve, put the black side towards the engine and then maybe a three-inch, few inch piece of rubber hose, the white side of the check valve and they give you a tee. All right, put one into the tee in there. The line that we ran over here from our operating unit, that gets pushed onto the tee. Another inch or two long piece of hose on the other side of the tee and then plug your original plastic vacuum line back into there to complete the whole system and seal it all off. And there's really nothing to this here, like I said. These just push in to the hoses and that's really all there is to it. Moving on, we can focus on our other air line tube coming from the operating unit as well as that black wire that we extended for our breakaway switch. The air line tube will run into the cab and you're also going to take, they give you a length of this brown wire. You're gonna take that and run that into the cab too, but you'll have your black wire that we extended. This brown wire, you wanna strip the ends back and twist them together. Get them really tight. Then you can take a butt connector, place it over both ends, crimp it down, and this is gonna get hooked up to included fuse holder. Make sure the fuse is not in it yet. We'll do that at the very end. One side you'll put on a ring terminal. The other side is going to get connected to that butt connector that we just put on, strip back and twist it this end to the end, and crimp it down. And I'm using heat shrink butt connectors so you can seal up the ends and it just provides a little more protection against corrosion. You can always grab these here at etrailer if you wanna upgrade to them. But because of that, I'm gonna come back with my heat source and seal up things. With that all hooked up, this needs to get attached to the positive battery terminal. So we have this nut here, it's a 12 millimeter I'm gonna remove it. And I try to keep pressure down on that main power wire just so it doesn't restart our radio or anything like that or just keep everything connected if I can help it. Put the ring terminal over it and just tighten it back down. Back to the air line and the brown wire that we ran inside of the cab, so it's tough to see from out here, but down in this pocket there's a factory grommet and you can carefully poke a hole in it and that'll give you a way to get your wires and your tubing inside. So that's what I did and what we should do, we'll go inside the vehicle underneath the dash and that way we can have a better look at it. Underneath the dash along the firewall, there's gonna be that rubber grommet that we talked about and that's where you're going to run the air line tube and the brown wire through to get it inside of the cab. It's pretty tight to push some wire through there. You can put some soapy water on it to help make things a little bit easier. Since we're down here in this area, we might as well get our actuator cylinder hooked up, which is this piece here that's connected to our brake pedal arm. You will need to, so in the kit they give you some longer machine screws which are these. So you'll have to swap those out for the shorter ones that come in it. You want the long ones since our brake pedal arm is really wide. And then that simply just clamps onto the brake pedal arm. And what you're looking for is a good straight shot when the brake pedal's pushed down this cylinder and the cable coming off the back of it is gonna have. And you want it low enough to where it has good leverage, but high enough to where it's not really in the way of your foot. So this is a happy medium here where I have this mounted up. You want to, if you have adjustable pedals, you wanna make sure that the pedals are adjusted all the way out or closest to you when you're doing this. That way, let's say if you had it adjusted more towards the floor and then someone comes in here and changes it, they could potentially rip the cable and damage things. So with it all the way out, if they we're to adjust the pedal in, it's just gonna have a bunch of slack. It's not gonna hurt anything. But with that in mind, that cable that comes off of the back of it, that attaches to the firewall. Again, you want a good straight shot. You can cut out a little bit of that carpet there. They give you a bracket with three holes in it. You can secure the bracket to the firewall with the outside holes and then take your anchor and another self-tapping screw and secure the anchor through the bracket into the firewall in the middle hole. And then that cable, you want the proper amount of tension on. Alright, so you want it to have just a little bit of slack when the pedal's resting like that. And so on top of that anchor, there's a four millimeter Allen key set screw and you can loosen that up and pull slack out or loosen it and pull the slack, tighten it up, and then tighten that set screw down to set your proper tension there. So once that's all set up, you can take the air line that we ran in, cut it to length, and that just plugs right into the actuator cylinder and that'll complete that deal there. And then off of the cylinder, you're gonna have a wire. That's our reed switch, they call it. And that wire's gonna get ran over into here where we can get this ready to be connected. Before you connect any of these wires though, we wanna come back up top by our rear view mirror inside of the cab here and run our indicator light wire down so we can do it all at the same time. So on our rear view mirror, we have this big plastic piece. We can mount up our indicator light to it. So just make sure your surface is clean 'cause this just has sticky tape on it so I stuck it to that. And then the wire comes off the indicator light. You can just push in behind this plastic through the seam. Same thing with the headliner, you can just run it up through the corner there. We're trying to get this wire to come out down by our feet. So it just runs all the way along. And then essentially just follow all the seams and the panels there. Push it down in there, push it behind your weather stripping all the way along that door's edge until it comes out down by our feet. So here's where our indicator light wire comes down and that breaks off into two wires. One of them will be black and that black one is gonna be a ground wire and so you crimp on a ring terminal and there's actually a metal bracket with a screw there that you can take off and use that as a ground. So that's what I did there. The red wire from our indicator light that is going to get connected to the blue wire from our reed switch. All right. That's pretty straightforward. And then the brown wire coming from our reed switch that is gonna get connected to that brown wire that we ran here inside of the cab from our engine compartment. Now that we have everything hooked up, you can come back to your fuse holder and place the fuse inside of it and you can clean up your wiring, zip tie it all up, make it secure, make it look nice. I put some wire loom around just to try to keep it hidden. And now that everything is done on our truck side, we can go up to our motorhome, get it plugged in and make sure everything works. While it has a good straight pull and whenever you apply the brakes, the cylinder's gonna activate and push the brake pedal down. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Demco Air Force One second vehicle kit on our 2022 Ram 1500..