Video Transcript for Detailed Breakdown of the Optronics Wishbone 4-Way Trailer Wiring Harness

Hey everyone, Ryan here at etrailer. Today we're gonna be checking out and showing you how we installed the Optronics 4-way Flat Wishbone Trailer Wiring. These are available in a 30 foot roll as well as a 25 foot roll. So whatever is going to suit your trailer the best. And this is going to make a great replacement or even an upgrade in some cases for broken or damaged trailer wiring that's set up on your trailer. And that was exactly our case here today.

So before we installed this, we took a couple shots here on what we had to work with. So why don't we check that out. So what this wiring is going to do is allow the lighting functions from our tow vehicle to get sent back to the lights on our trailer. And being a 4-way flat type connector, that'll give us our brake lights, our taillights, as well as our turn signals. And I say Wishbone type connector, right And all that means is we have more or less two taillight signal wires, all right.

So this makes it a lot easier to set up your trailer because one wire will go over to the passenger side, and the other wire will go over to the driver's side. Well, instead of only having one taillight wire to work with and having to kind of splice in and jump over to the other side of the trailer and everything, you can just route each individual one with the stop and turn wires too. So it saves you a lot of time and kind of makes figuring things out a lot easier. And not to mention potentially overloading, you know, one wire that's responsible for every single taillight on the trailer. It kind of breaks it off into a couple there and kind of isolates everything a little bit, if that makes sense.

The ground wire on these kits is going to have a pre-attached ring terminal, which is nice. One less thing you gotta worry about connecting separately. On the 30 foot roll, the ground wire's gonna be 30 inches long and on the 25 foot roll the ground wire is going to be 42 inches long. That's really the main differences between the two kits other than the overall length and not really a huge deal to be honest. Usually a 30 inch lead is more than long enough but you know, I'd rather have more than enough than the other way around.

One of the things I think would be nice to see with these kits here would be the cap, you know, if something like this was included and connected to the harness. This is an old broken one I had laying around, but just wanna give you a visual. I think that'd be nice if it came with something like that. That way when you're not using the trailer you can pop that on there, help keep the weather and stuff off of it. And something that you can do from time to time too, especially if you know that you plan on the trailer sitting for a while or something, is take dielectric grease, you can apply it to the terminals and that'll help keep 'em protected as well. As far as what length harness will work best for your particular trailer, it really just depends on how you plan on routing everything and how big the overall trailer is. With ours, it's just a little five by eight trailer and we used a 25 foot roll and it was more than enough. When I pick wiring out for trailer stuff I always try to go a little long just 'cause you never know and I like to leave, you know, some extra wiring back there to work with whenever we do set all this up. That way you know, if you ever need to make a repair in the future or something, you actually have some wire to work with. Because as you know, I'm sure it's not uncommon to have to kind of mess with trailer wiring from it sitting outside and things like that. Other than that, at the end of the day, you know, not really a whole lot to this. Definitely get all your wiring renewed and get your back on the road again with all your lights working. As far as installation, you know everyone's setup's gonna be a little bit different but it's pretty straightforward, you know, running the wires back, tying 'em into the taillights and the side marker lights and things like that. These kits aren't gonna come with any connectors and that's something you'll have to provide yourself. You can pick up some 'em here at etrailer. I like to use these heat shrink style butt connectors. You know, depending on your trailer and everything. Might not be a bad idea just to get a whole pack of 'em 'cause you usually end up using 'em. So you will need stuff like that if you don't have it. And I also recommend picking up zip ties and just those small ins and outs to be able to secure the wiring how you want to. But with that in mind, why don't we go ahead and do this one together now. On our trailer today, this is a pretty good example on where replacing the whole harness might just be more beneficial than trying to repair kind of what's already there. You know, we have intermittent lighting signals going on and the wiring's just kind of dated, you know, it's getting old. I'm sure there's some bad spots in it kind of throughout the whole entire trailer. And being the fact that we're kind of giving this whole utility trailer a facelift, that way to get it back up and going again and have a small reliable trailer, it almost makes more sense just to kind of start from scratch, get the whole harness done and then, you know, everything should work properly in the future. One of the things that I like to do is cut the end of your old harness off and then you can take your new harness, tape it to those wires and use the old wires like a pole wire. You know you can pull them and kind of feed the new wiring where it needs to go. With that said, the green wire, that'll be for the right side stop and turn. And the brown wire that's connected it, that'll be for any taillights on that side of the trailer. And of course the yellow is your left side stop and turn. And the brown wire will be for any taillights on that side of the trailer, so. Make sure your wires are all straight and everything. Tape 'em to the old ones and then you can just start to kind of pull on your old wiring to feed everything through. So we get all our wires pulled through and once we get to the end here we can take the white wire with the pre-attached ring terminal. That's gonna need to be grounded to the frame of the trailer. I just cleaned off a spot here, scraped it down to bare metal, used a self-tapping screw. We'll go ahead and get this secured down. (tool buzzes) Started to route our wires and we're over here on the passenger side just to give you a reference. And a lot of times on the side of your trailer, you're gonna have little side marker lights, right So the brown wire's gonna have to tie in to those side marker lights. So here is the end of the wiring for our side markers and I just twisted the ends together and how we'll tie 'em in, we'll just very carefully cut just the ground wire as this will be for our taillights. And what I'm gonna do (snippers click) is strip both of these ends back. (snippers click) (tool clatters) And this is how I like to make all the connections, using heat shrink style butt connectors, because the ends seal up and they just tend to hold up better against corrosion and stuff, especially on you know, trailer work. A little twist, and ends together, and we'll take our butt connector, push that over both ends there, get it crimped down. And the same thing for our existing wiring from our side markers. Get that all crimped. (tool thuds) Make sure everything's in there nice and tight. We'll come back with our heat source and seal up there. (heat tool hums) Once that connection is made, for good measure, I came back with some electrical tape, taped everything up real good. And if you happen to have more side marker lights, you just continue to kind of make those connections in line with your brown taillight wire. In our case on this small trailer, these are the only ones we have. So we just need to run these now, our brown and green, all the way back to the taillight. Back here to our taillight, made those connections just like we did the other ones, you know, brown to brown for our taillight signal. Green to green. And this is for passenger side. Driver's side be the same thing except you take the yellow wire, put it to the yellow wire on your taillight. And not all taillights are gonna have this configuration. Most of them will, but that's just something you're gonna have to look at. You know when your wiring is still hooked up, take note of it. Or a lot of times there will be a diagram on the back of the light that tells you what wire does what function. So go ahead and make the appropriate connection. Just a word of advice too, you know, if you happen to have some extra wiring length, you know, if the harness is more than long enough, I like to leave a little bit at each connection, you know, an extra foot or so if you can. That way, you know, we can bundle this up. Not a big deal, but if you ever do have to need to make a repair or end up, let's say changing the taillight out and have to cut these wires, at least we'll have a little bit to work with here. We won't have to deal with trying to extend 'em or kind of make do. When I have everything hooked up, it's a good idea to test everything, right. So I'm hooked up to a test box. You can use your tow vehicle, but keep in mind if your tow vehicle happens to have issues, it could mislead you, thinking it's something you did on the trailer side. But we're gonna try out our taillights, our left turn signal, (light clicks) our right turn signal (light clicks) and our brake lights. With everything working in the back, chances are pretty good our side marker lights will work as well, but always a good idea just to double check those. If I turn on our taillights, (light clicks) we see those illuminate and we know we're in good shape. Came back, secured everything up with zip ties, P-clamps, things like that to make sure the wiring doesn't go anywhere. And then, something I like to do too, just to give it an extra layer of protection, make it look a little bit better, is I like to take wire loom and all the exposed parts of the wiring, just place it over it, just to keep the elements off of it.