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Ryan: Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. today on our 2018 Ford Explorer, we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Curt T connector vehicle wiring harness.The main thing that we're going to use our wiring for is to provide our trailer with the necessary lighting functions, not only to remain safe, but legal. We're going to get our tail lights, our brake lights and our turn signals. And something else too not a lot of people think about is that this can be used with accessories that actually light up. So cargo carriers, little steps, things of that nature. The majority of them share the same type of connector, so you're going to be able to power those up with this as well.It is going to come included with a really nice thick, rubber dust cap because the wiring is designed to be mounted outside here.
This is really going to help protect those terminals from any corrosion issues. Now, even though we have this tab, I always recommend to go a step further and to apply some dielectric grease on the terminals from time to time, and that'll just really ensure that they stay in great shape.One thing I do really like is how the wiring comes with this wire loom on it, and that's just going to help it blend in a little bit better, be a little bit easier to hide and provide our wiring with one extra layer of protection. And probably the best part about the wiring is how simple it's going to be to get installed. It's just going to utilize a factory connector and it simply just plugs right in. So you're not going to have to worry about taking your tail lights out or running separate wires and tapping into anything.
It shouldn't take you hardly any time at all. Speaking of which let's go ahead and do that together now.To begin our installation, we're going to be working underneath the bottom of our Explorer right here on the passenger side. Here in that area, you can see our factory connector and our new wiring is actually going to get plugged in line with this, so we'll have to disconnect this factory connector here. If you kind of pull down on it, it will separate it from the little clip, just holding it in place, making it easier to work with and to separate these two, if you look, we see this tab here in the center. You push down on that.
You're able to pull the two apart.Now, we can grab our trailer wiring and simply just plug it in. One connector is going to line up with one side of the factory connector and also put some dielectric grease onto the terminals. Plug them two together. And the other side is going to pair up with the other. Once you have it plugged in, what I'm going to do now is route our wiring over to where we're going to mount up our four way connector, and then I'll show you how I did that.Here's how I routed the wiring.
Along the way, I just use some zip ties to keep it secure. I just run it along through here. So I went up along our hitch. You want to do your best to avoid the hot exhaust. I just continued to run it along the top of our hitch. Here I have it dropping down and have our connector mounted to the spread. Now, something I want to point out the wiring, does not come included with the bracket. In our case, our hitch already had one mounted to it, so we just had to pick up a little four way flat bracket. If your hitch does not have a spot to mount this portion, you can always use a no drill bracket and achieve the same thing. Or what you can do is always just zip tie the wiring to your hitch, or use a dust cap to loop it around the safety chain openings and keep it secure that way.Now, we can go ahead and test our wiring that way we can make sure everything's working properly. Go ahead and turn on our running lights. We'll hit our brake lights, our left turn and our right turn. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Curt T connector vehicle wiring harness on our 2018 Ford Explorer.
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