Brake Buddy Classic 3 Portable Supplemental Braking System Installation - 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 2

Products Featured in this Video

Brake Buddy Classic 3 Portable Supplemental Braking System

139 reviews

Code: HM39494

Retail: $1,504.99

Price:  $956.82

• Tow Bar Braking Systems
• Brake Systems
• Pre-Set System
• Recurring Set-Up

• Portable System
• Brake Buddy

Get reliable braking with this lightweight, portable system. Actuator unit applies towed car's brakes after receiving signal via internal inertia sensor. Braking power settings let you adjust brake intensity based on your towed car's weight.

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How to Install the Brake Buddy Classic 3 Portable Supplemental Braking System on a 2020 Chevrolet S

Hey everybody, how's it going Today we're gonna be going over the Brake Buddy Classic 3 Portable Braking System here on a 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 2500. So a braking system simply put, is gonna be depressing the brakes in our vehicle here to help our motor home come to a nice, slow and smooth stop. Now, this is not only a safety concern. That's also a legal requirement in nearly every state. So it is gonna be a required part of your flat toe setup. So there's really two main types of breaking systems on the market.

We have the portable ones and the permanent ones. Now the Brake Buddy Classic is going to be a portable one and those are great because they don't require a lengthy initial setup nor do they require a lot of modifying to the vehicle. It's just something you're gonna sit into the floorboard each time, hook up a couple things and press a few buttons. And you're pretty much good to go. Now with a permanent system they really don't require as much setup each time.

It's usually just flip a switch and then take off down the road. But the initial installation is much more lengthy and they also require some pretty significant modifications to your vehicle. So those are great for some people and they do work well. I like the Stay-in-Play and the Air Force but if you ask me, the portable systems really are best in my mind just to due to how little modifications they really require on the vehicle. And they're not too bad to set up each time you need to get in and go.

So here is what the actual unit looks like. And you can see here it's just gonna sit in our driver's side floorboard here and when it gets power, it's gonna press on the seat and therefore press the pedal. So a pretty easy design and this thing is pretty lightweight. This handle actually collapses down. So it's pretty easy to store inside the vehicle as well.

It's really not too big of an issue. On the top here we're gonna have our wireless transmitter with the breakaway system. So there's actually gonna be a monitor inside the motor home there. That's gonna light up if it lets you know if there's any issues here should the vehicle come detached from the motor home. So just a worst case scenario there, there is gonna be some sort of visual alert. And then we have a power plug here. So this actually gets wired into the vehicle and you just hook this up each time to the vehicle or you hooked this up each time to your brake system and you can remove these pretty easily. So you don't have to worry about that wire dangling down on you, but that's pretty much it inside the cab here. We have our actual physical connection here to the brake pedal. That's pretty easy to undo when you're done. You just loosen that clamp there. You can take it off and then tighten it back up when you're ready to go. So overall a pretty simple setup definitely not too lengthy. It's just a few extra steps each time. And then with our kit you're also gonna get a breakaway switch. So we talked about that monitor earlier. This is actually the physical device that triggers that monitor. And once this pin is pulled it's gonna send that signal through the breaking system allowing it to provide the braking here on our vehicle helping it come to a stop. We also get a lanyard here. That's just gonna bridge the connection between the vehicle and the motor home. So another reason I really like this particular system here is that it actually comes with a battery charge line kit. Now, what this does is this is gonna provide a charge from the motor home to the vehicle's battery. So you don't ever have to worry about arriving to the campsite with a dead battery here on your vehicle because the braking system will pull a little bit of power from that. So it's just an extra safety measure there to ensure you don't have any issues when you arrive at the campsite. Pretty much every other braking system I know of this is an optional component that comes separately. So you would have to pay for that. Whereas Brake Buddy, they went ahead and thrown this in for you. So you don't need to worry about purchasing an extra part and spending more money. So now that we've gone over the braking system let's go ahead and jump into the installation part so we can show you how to get that done. And thankfully, this is pretty minor. It shouldn't take you guys too long. Just some common hand tools are gonna be required. We'll walk you through that step by step now. So the first step of our braking system installation is to take our battery charger here. So we're over on the passenger side of the vehicle. There is a battery on either side, on the diesel models, and this is a diesel model. So just keep that in mind but we're gonna go ahead and hook this up here to the battery over here on the passenger side. So I just went ahead and removed that fuse box cover. And now we just need to find a place to mount our two little devices here. So we have this little fuse we also have the battery charger module. So I'm actually gonna mount it inside here to the frame or this core support. So we're actually just gonna use some self tapping screws which are not provided in your kit. I'm just gonna attach them down here, like so, so this is pretty thick metal. So it is kind of hard to get your screws through there but you can still do it. So now that we have everything mounted up, we'll go ahead and run our wires. I just used a couple zip ties just to secure it. Just some existing lines here on the sides of the vehicle. So we have two connections we need to make black and white. White is ground, black is power. We'll hook the power one up first. So it actually already comes with a ring terminal crimped on there. But since we have so much extra wire and I do have some extra ring terminals, I'm just gonna go ahead and cut that off so I can attach it to the positive battery terminal. So now we need to hook up our white ground wire from our battery charge line. Now, normally I'll just hook this to the negative battery terminal but we can't do that because on this vehicle you have to disconnect the negative battery terminal in the flat toe. So we're just gonna use an existing ground over here. This is a battery hold down strap so we can use that. I'm just gonna go ahead, take a 13 millimeter socket, remove that bolt, and then I will hook the ground terminal up to that and then resecure it. Just like that. So next we're gonna have our red wire. We're actually gonna be running this through the trailer connector through the umbilical cord to the motor home. So if you guys don't have a seven to six way connection you will need to obtain those. They're really common kits. There's tons of 'em out there. So it should be pretty easy to find one if you don't have one, but we'll go ahead and route this down through the engine bay now to where we have our trailer connector located in the front of the vehicle. So now the next thing we're gonna be doing is mounting the in cab controller for our breaking system. So this needs to be mounted onto the driver dash because this is what we're gonna be plugging our actual breaking unit into to receive power. So we'll go ahead and show you how we have ours mounted now. So here is the plug mounted up on the dash here. We just attach it using two, of the screws that come in your kit here. Just make sure you look behind this panel here to make sure there's nothing back there that those screws would pierce. And we just mounted ours in between the hood latch release mechanism and the OBD two port. Now there's actually a thick cord coming from the back of this plug here that we need to route into the engine bay. Now it's kind of hard to get the plug into the engine bay is because there's really no grommets, existing grommets that is, that we can pass through. I looked under here for quite a while and I really couldn't see anything. So what we did is we actually had to drill a hole into the firewall so we can pass our wire through. So we went ahead and pulled our wires up from the engine bay there, where we drilled our hole. I did have to reach in there, but then I just pulled them straight up and you can see 'em here. So now a couple of these wires are gonna attach to a breakaway switch and then we have a power and ground. So we've got everything wired up now. So we'll go ahead and go over that wiring with you. You can see this is kind of our junction point here. This is where we have the buck connectors where we made all of our connections. The first one we attached is that white ground wire. You can see, we just use this bolt here. You'll take a 13 millimeter socket remove that put the ring terminal on and then zip it back down. And then we're gonna have the black wire coming from our in cab controller. We're gonna attach that to the red wire coming from the fuse holder that comes in your kit. And we're actually gonna run this all the way across over to here, underneath this panel here there's a couple push pin fasteners. We just popped those up, shove the wire behind there and then ran it all the way over to here. And if we trace that red wire, you can see where we have our fuse holder mounted down in here. So that's that little guy right there. So this end is gonna go into this side. This other side we actually extended it a little bit because we have to come out and around and onto this stud here, inside our fuse block, that's also gonna require 13 millimeter socket. Just remove that stud, put your ring terminal over there and then zip it back down. Next we have our breakaway switch. The breakaway switch is gonna be mounted on the front of the vehicle here. Now you do get some brackets to mount this that come in your kit. However, our base plate kit actually came with its own bracket that we can mount it to. So that's what we decided to use. Just go ahead and attach it there, like so, and then you're gonna run your wire up into the engine bay and ours is gonna come out in this little hole here. So we used a fish wire to get that wire up in here which is basically just taking a piece of airline tubing sticking it down through the opening tying it to your wires, and then pulling them in here. And you can see those two breakaway wires coming here and then we'll just simply attach them to the two leftover wires we have coming from that in cab controller plug. So we've got everything wired and hooked up and that's pretty much gonna do it today for our installation of the Break Buddy Classic 3 Supplemental Braking System here on a 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 2500..