Arrives before Christmas 
Use this universal, splice-in wiring harness to connect your trailer to your tow vehicle. Provides reverse function to release surge brakes. Corrosion-resistant terminals are long-lasting.
Features:
Specs:
Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today we're gonna be checking out and showing you how to hook up the Hopkins five way trailer connector in. So what this five way is going to do is give you your basic functions. Right So you'll have your brake lights, your turn signals and your taillights but it's also gonna have another function. That's what this blue wire is here. That's gonna be for your reverse lights.
So there's a few instances on where this connector end would come in handy. If your trailer already has a setup like this and maybe the connector's beat up you can pick this up, you know, cut a portion of your existing wiring off and connect this into it. That way everything's new and fresh, or you can, I guess you could call it, upgrade from your traditional style four way flat connector here. And that's what we did here today. So on our boat trailer what we're doing is adding disc brakes and when you add disc brakes to a boat trailer or brakes for that matter, you're gonna have a surge type actuator here in the coupler.
And depending on what one you have some of these have an electric reverse lockout. And so what what will happen whenever the reverse light signal goes into here, it won't lock up the brakes and it'll let us allow us to back up. And so that's what we did. We got rid of our four way and hooked this one up, that way we can take our reverse signal that's gonna be coming from our towed vehicle or from our truck, It'll go into here and go into our reverse lockout solenoid whenever we're backing up or what some people do as well is, on my own smaller utility trailers and things like that, some people like to put reverse lights, you know, when they're backing up to the work site or whatever the case may be, and you could end up, you know, hooking up your reverse lights to this signal here and granted it's not gonna put out a ton of amperage but, you know, if you got a couple of led lights it's gonna be more than enough and that will work. So a few different applications for this, you know, I'm sure people use 'em for other things, too.
Those are just kind of things that come to my mind and something I wanna mention just since it's a five way, you can still use a, a four way flat, so let's say if your vehicle only has a four way or let's say if you get in a pinch, you need to borrow someone's car or something, you can still plug a four way into this. Right You just wont utilize that particular circuit. On a trailer like ours, probably not a good idea 'cause of this but if it's a utility trailer and it's, you're just using it for reverse lights, you know, it's not critical but just wanted to mention that, that way, you know, you kind of know what you need to do with your vehicle side. So I do wanna mention, you know, you're probably thinking what do I need to do on my vehicle side for this to work So let's just say, for example, if your tow vehicle only has a seven way round type trailer connector plug on on the back bumper or whatever, obviously this aint gonna plug right into it. So that's where something like this would come into play.
So this is essentially just an adapter and that end would plug into your vehicle seven way. And then it just turns into a five way flat connector. That way you can just plug that right in get everything that way. So pretty straight forward. Or let's say if your vehicle only has a four-way flat type connector on it, and you obviously want to use the reverse light function, there's vehicle ends as well. So you can actually convert your existing four-way flat connector on your car or your truck to one of these and be able to plug everything in and have all the functions actually work. The harness is going to be 18 inches long. So you're definitely gonna have some wires to work with in terms of that, depending on what you're doing you may need to extend some of 'em or kind of just depends on your existing trailer wiring, what's a, what's to work with there. And I do wanna mention, you know, it would be nice if they gave you a dust cover for this, obviously trailers sit outside a lot. It'd be nice to get this protected but if that's something you're interested in you can actually pick one up. It's pretty cool. It'll Mount to your trailer and then when you're done using it, you know, you can just plug it in there. So pretty cool actually, and to actually get this installed you know, it's gonna be similar for most people. We'll do it here in a moment and just kind of hopefully get you going in the right direction. But you know, you are gonna need a few things. I use some heat shrink butt connectors and a ring terminal. And then, you know, if you want to get wire loom and stuff you can always pick that up to but that's really just gonna be up to you. But if you'd like to see how we hook this up feel free to follow along. We'll go ahead and do that now. As far as the install goes, you know, everything's gonna be pretty much about the same. It's just really gonna depend on your particular application. If you already have a five way that's just all beat up and chewed up, you know, it'd be a direct replacement essentially. What we're doing is actually upgrading from our four way and that's because on our boat trailer here we're adding brakes and putting a different actuator up here which needs a reverse light circuit. So that's, that's what we're doing, doing here. So like I said, generally speaking, you know, it's five wires, they gotta be hooked up. So to begin ours though, what we're gonna do is get rid of our four way wiring here. So I'm gonna try to save as much wire as I can and I'm just going to, you know, cut these, cut these ends off. And since I'm adding a new coupler up here, it's a lot bulkier. I think I'm going to relocate this wire down below the trailer. So once I do that, I'll show you it and then we can actually start to get this hooked up. So I dropped our wired on through the bottom of the frame. Now there's already hole there and just makes more sense with the setup we're getting ready to do. I did strip back the ends of the insulation on these wires to kind of prep them. And we can do our actual five way now. So with these four wires, you will have to split 'em. So just carefully kind of cut in between 'em. We'll peel 'em back a little ways. Like that and then I'm gonna strip back all the ends here. Let's do this one at a time. Once you strip it back, give it a twist and then take a heat shrink butt connector, place that over the end and crimp it down. I'll do the same thing for our remaining ends here. So here's what all the ends look like and now we can get ready to hook 'em up. So your blue ones could be for your reverse light circuit. Green will be right turn, yellow will be left turn. Brown will be taillights and white will be your ground. And that essentially holds true for the majority of trailer wiring. So ours is set up a little different. So we have green for right, yellow for left and then these two browns are for our taillights on each side. You might have two wires like this, you might have one, but with these, our taillight ones here, I'm just gonna twist them together and that'll work just fine. And now we can start to hook these up color for color. So there's some of our connections made and with these being heat shrinks, I'm gonna take a heat source and seal up the ends. As far as the blue wire and our white ground wire, what I did with the white one, I just added a couple foot of wire to it 'cause I'm not real sure where I'm gonna ground this just yet. And the blue wire will get hooked to your reverse lights circuit, whether it be, you know, for utility lights, some sort of reverse lights on your trailer or in our case, it's gonna go to the actuator on our coupler here on our boat trailer for the reverse lockout. So before I worry about getting these hooked up I'd like to get our coupler on, that way we know kind of what we have to work with and we can get everything all done at once. With this all bolted down, we can hook up the wiring coming out of it. So there will be two wires. One of 'em will be ground. The other one will go to the reverse light signal. Doesn't matter which wire, you know, either end as long as you're eventually both hooked up. So kinda got this one ready, crimped on a butt connector, and I'll just use that one for our reverse light wire coming from our five way wiring. It's usually blue. So to hook these up, strip back the insulation, give it a good twist. Put that bare end of the wire in there and crimp it down. And since this is a heat shrink type connector I'm gonna grab my heat source real quick and seal up the ends. For our, the other wire here, I guess that's gonna be ground. I need to hook up the ground for our new five-way wiring anyway so I just twisted them together and we'll just share a ground, kind of reduce or eliminate one extra unnecessary connection if that makes sense. So twist them together. My ring terminal isn't a heat shrink style so I have a piece of tubing here, heat shrink tubing that I'm gonna use. I'll slide that on first, followed by our ring terminal. Crimp it down. Slide my tubing over the top. And once I heat shrink this we can ground it to the frame. To ground this I just have a self tapping screw. We're gonna go to our frame and just get it secured. So I went ahead, got our white wire and our blue wire hooked up. I did have to extend the blue wire just like we did the white one but our white wire goes to ground. So pretty straightforward. I just crimped on a ring terminal, screwed it to our frame with a self tapping screw. And the blue wire in our case is going to our actuator coupler here for the reverse lockout. This might vary a little bit for yours. If you have a setup like this, this is what it'll go to. Or like I said, if you have some type of other accessory on your trailer, whatever the case may be, you'd get that hooked up as well. But really, beside from kind of taping everything up and getting it clean, that's really about it. If you have the rest of your lighting system and whatnot hooked up it's probably not a bad idea to test this too to make sure all of our connections are good. So I plugged into a test box. You can use your tow vehicle too. Just keep in mind if it has any issues with it, might translate over to the trailer side but we'll try our taillights. Our left turn signal. Our right turn signal and our brake lights. So now that we verified everything works I simply just taped up all of our connections and put on some wire loom just to help kind of clean up our install look, but with that done, that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Hopkins five-way trailer connector..
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (25 Customer Reviews)
Use this universal, splice-in wiring harness to connect your trailer to your tow vehicle. Provides reverse function to release surge brakes. Corrosion-resistant terminals are long-lasting.Good for converting 4 wire boat trailer harness to 5 wire. I would have preferred an adapter that plugged into the existing 4 wire plug with an integrated backup wire that is spliced into the blue wire on the trailer.
The whole staff at etrailer bent over backwards to make sure I was satisfied with the installation of brakes on my trailer. Have made several purchases from them always satisfied with parts and service. Special credit to Jamie great to deal with. Answered all my questions and was very knowledgeable.
I purchased trailer lighting for my flatbed trailer. Very satisfied with the parts and the service I received. Will use you again when the need arises.
This is great for hooking tailgate light bars with back up lights
My order came on time and the product is great. The Tech support was great this is my new go to place for all my parts now.
Product was everything as advertised, and with great quality. Way to build a long term customer base!
I have used etrailer.com for multiple purchases for my boat trailer and am quite pleased with their customer service.
The harness works great. I've never had a problem with anything I've ordered from you folks.
Easy to install and last forever.
I was moor impressed with the customer services I received from Dena W.
She was very professional and extremely helpful through this hole process. Dena stayed in constant communication with me through everything that happened with this order. She gets 5 Stars
Works great and is continuing to work after a year.
itme was easy to order online, and i got what i ordered and on time. Good product.
Works great
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Good communication and delivery I would buy from again
Good
thanks
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