Roadmaster Universal Diode Wiring Kit Installation - 2022 Ford Maverick
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How to Install the Roadmaster Universal Diode Wiring Kit on a 2022 Ford Maverick
Hello, neighbors, it's Brad here at etrailer. And, today, we're taking a look and installing the Roadmaster Diode Wiring Kit for a towed vehicle on a 2022 Ford Maverick. Now there's gonna be five main components that are gonna be required to flat tow your vehicle. And starting on the vehicle side is gonna be your base plate. And the base plate is generally attached to the chassis of the vehicle, or the structural parts of it, to create a nice, sturdy mounting point for your tow bar. And so that brings us to the tow bar, which is our second component.
That's gonna make the connection between the base plate and the hitch of the RV. Now on our base plate here, we also have our safety chain loops, which these are just a secondary protection just in case of an accidental disconnect. We also have our diode wiring, and that's gonna transfer the light signals from the RV, so that way when you have your running lights, brake lights, or turn signals on, it's going to mimic those in the taillights of the vehicle letting the people behind you know when you are turning or slowing down. Now you also have your breakaway cable which is part of your supplemental braking system, and that's going to allow the vehicle to slow and stop as the RV slows and stops. Now when flat towing a vehicle, you need to understand that your vehicle's essentially gonna become a trailer behind your RV, so just as you would have trailer lighting, you're gonna do the same to your vehicle.
And while there's options for magnetic lighting that mount on the vehicle, and you have to run those wires a lot of times and there are wireless versions, but diode wiring is a great option for anyone that's planning on flat towing their vehicle more than a few times a year, because it's simply plug in and you're ready to go. As you can see, we're mimicking all of the same light sequences of our RV and that's gonna continue to do that with the running lights, the brake lights, and the turn signals. Now depending on the kit you choose, there's gonna be a few different options and really it's gonna come down to connector end. So you can get one with a four pole on there or you can get one that's bare. And then, the other options that you'll be choosing are gonna be which umbilical you're going to have.
So you're actually gonna have a few options there as well. You're gonna have a coiled version, a straight version, as well as a hybrid version, so that way you can match it to whatever tow bar you're using. Now whatever kit you choose, installation's gonna be all the same as you're gonna be tying diodes into the wiring on the taillights. And it may seem a little bit scary or nerve-wracking to be able to cut into your wires, but it is really simple to do. And, again, this is gonna set your vehicle up for any time you're ready to flat tow.
You simply just plug in and you'll be ready to go. Now to begin your diode wiring, the first thing you're gonna wanna do is, obviously, make sure you have your base plate installed and that's why we have our front fascia off. Because during that installation, if you are doing the rest of your flat tow components, it's a lot easier to have that fascia off to run your wires. So seeing our bracket here where we're gonna have our six pole, this is where I've just kind of taped up our wires. That way I could start our run. And also, if you're running a charge line, it might be a good time to run this at the same time at least until we get to the engine bay. So we'll just trace our wires. I just simply ran them kind of up and through. It does get a little bit tight. But you can see kind of right here I just kind of made some zip ties to keep it away from the radiator, any of those hot or moving parts. And then, just kind of pulled it up, which you can see under the headlight just a hair. And then, it comes up through here. Now depending on your braking system, you may not need to run it up here. We're using the Demco Stay-IN-Play DUO which does require tying into your wiring here, so it makes it a lot easier because you're mounting the module to be able to splice in. So, again, it depends on your braking system. But for now we just ran just a little extra loop here. And then, I just took our wire and passed it down. You can see it through the transmission tunnel. And I'm gonna raise the vehicle up and we'll get a view from there. Now I've made my way down and I've just kind of used some of the wires to hold it in place, that way we're not making contact with the axles or the sway bar, and I've just kind of zip tied up where I can to kind of keep it up and tight. So I've gone ahead and removed the underbody skid plate panel here just to kind of get us a little bit better visuals, and it's also a little bit easier to run our wire. So you can see I've gone ahead and tried to use our factory wire looms to kind of hold it in place, and I've also made a few zip ties just to kind of secure it. Now once I ran it down here, I actually made my way over. This is gonna make it a little bit easier for you all at home to run the rest of the wire. And I've pulled this down. Now there's a series of plastic push pins, and then some 10 millimeter nuts. But once you have this kind of peeled back on one side, I've just gone ahead and used some of the holes in the chassis to zip tie this up. And then, making our way down, I've also used some of the brackets here to zip tie it up. Now you'll see once you continue on, I've pulled my white wire back. I just split it and peeled it back to this section here, 'cause we have a factory ground. So I've gone ahead and just attached a ring terminal, and that way I know this is a nice, solid ground for our wiring. But also it gives us an extra length of wire to make our jumper between the two taillights. So you can go back further if you want. But using this ground here does seem to give us enough wire. So from there, I've just kind of routed this up. And then, I've gone over the filler neck here. And, just again, using some of our factory brackets, I went through the hole here on the chassis to support it. And then, I've made my way right here. So now we have our green wire, our brown, and our yellow is still attached. So I'm gonna run our yellow and brown up to our left light. And then, we can run this eventually to our right. But let's go ahead, we'll make our attachments on our left taillight. Now we're gonna need to pass our wires up and tie into our plug that goes to our taillights, so we need to actually remove our taillight. And you're gonna see there's two eight millimeters screws here. We'll just go ahead and get those taken out. Now to pop these out, there's gonna be two prongs that they kind of go in at a 45-degree angle. So you don't want those to break. So kind of loosening 'em up and shaking the taillight just a little bit gently will kind of loosen 'em up. But really the force you're gonna wanna pull this way at that 45, you can kind of get the bottom one and get a gap here. And then, just be gentle, and you can see those prongs there. So you don't wanna snap them, they are plastic. And then, we have our taillight harness here. So we're gonna go ahead and just unclip this. There's a little tab there. And I've already gone ahead and tested our wires to know which circuits we need to tie into. But to tie into here, we're gonna need to peel this insulation back. It's gonna make it a little bit easier to make our connection obviously. But I tried to go back as far as possible, that way we still have a little bit of play here to be able to plug in and it's not gonna stress those wires out. So I'm gonna go ahead and get this insulation peeled back. It can be tricky. So using a small knife or a set of clippers here, just make sure you're not damaging the wires. So just take your time here. And once you kind of get a little bit cut back, sometimes you can just peel the whole thing off. So now we need to actually test to figure out which are the wires that we're gonna be tying into. So we need to figure out which ones are our running light. And then, also this is a combined light, so our brake light and turn signals will be the same wire. I've gone ahead and done that for you, just using a test probe I've run them through the light sequence and figured out what lit up our tester. And so I've determined our purple is gonna be our running light. Now there's a purple and blue it looks like, or maybe a green, it's kind of hard to see. But you're gonna want these solid purple. So we'll set this one aside. And then, our brake and turn is gonna be a green and white. So if you're looking at your plug, it should be these top ones here. So on the top right, and then that middle one. So just make sure you have those wires set aside from the others. And then, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut this back right about here, again, just giving us a little bit of extra room up here. It's gonna make it a little bit easier for our plugging in of the wire. So just make a cut here. And then, we're gonna go ahead and strip back both sides. These are pretty small wires here, they can be fragile, just take your time. So now we have these all stripped back, we're gonna wanna grab our diode. So we've determined which wires we're gonna be tying into, but we also need to get our diode wiring passed up. And this is a pretty large cavity here, so we can just go ahead and pull this up. I'm gonna feed it through the same hole here just to kind of make it a little cleaner. And then, I mentioned earlier, I pulled that white wire back, it's for our ground wire. And the excess wire here, this is gonna be a jumper. So we're gonna be running from our driver's side over to our passenger. So if you really want to, you can take your white wire and pass this down back to the underside of the vehicle and just leave enough wire kind of at the same length to tie into here. So now I'm gonna just cut off our excess brown and yellow here. And then, I'm gonna go ahead and strip all these back as well so we can make our diode connections. So on your diodes, there's gonna be spade connectors. And what we're gonna do is determine which one gets the yellow one, because you can see it's for a larger gauge wire. And this is gonna be where that jumper, that white wire, goes into. And pretty simple, our brown is gonna be our running light. So I'm gonna go ahead and just go ahead and get that one put on. And then, we know the rest of 'em will be the blue spade connectors. So this is gonna be jumping our running lights from one side to the other. So with all of our connections too, you wanna make sure that it is taut, just making sure that you give it a slight tug, nothing too tight, but that way it doesn't come loose over time. So now the rest of our wires, we're just gonna take off our spade connectors from our diodes, and there's gonna be two diodes per side of vehicle. So just pull those spade connectors off, and then we'll just simply crimp them down on our yellow, as well as the wires that we spliced down there. Now these wires, the factory ones, they're pretty thin. So I would suggest stripping it back a little bit further, and then just kind of put in a bend at the end. That's gonna give it a little bit thicker bite for that spade connector. Now looking at our diodes, it has an arrow that says In and Out. And so our Out is gonna feed towards our plug. You're gonna see it's just got the single spade connector there. So what I'm gonna do just to make it easier, take the two wires on the plug side here and we're gonna plug one in here. It does not matter which one, as long as they're both on the Out. And then, knowing that our purple is the running light and that's where we actually made our splice connection here. So we're gonna go ahead, you can plug this to either one, does not matter. And then, we're just gonna connect that purple and that way it still has that factory connection. It's still running through the diode, but we've tied into it. So we'll just plug this in. And these can get a little bit tight here. Just make sure that you have a nice, solid connection in that spade connector. And then, pretty easy, we're gonna grab our other diode and we're just gonna plug our yellow, and then the green and white. Now those are connected. And we're gonna wanna make sure that these wires don't get stressed or pull out of those spade connectors, so I'm gonna go ahead and just put a zip tie around our diodes here. And then, I might wrap some electrical tape around there as well just to kind of keep all those wires together. And you can also do the same on this end too. Again, just to kind of keep any of these wires from stress and you don't want this to pull out here. So now we have one side with our connections made, we can go ahead and plug this back in. And then, we'll get our taillight back in place. So what I'm doing here is just gonna tuck this down and that way this isn't causing any clearance issues. So it actually seems like it can sit in this area pretty well. We'll get our plugs back in, and then we'll just put our eight millimeter screws back in. So with this side done, we can hop over to the passenger side and remove the taillight, and start unraveling the insulation wire on that as well. So now we need to route our green and white wire over to the passenger side. And you can see, I've kind of just zip tied our excess wires here. But our green and white, I was able to run it through this channel across the spare tire. And I was able to come out over here where I've zip tied it up to a hole there and that's gonna keep it up away from that spare tire. Now there is this plastic cover and I actually just kind of fish wired it through using an air line tube here. You could remove this all the same. But I was able to pass this up and pull the rest of our wires by just throwing some electrical tape around it. And then, I just routed our green and white wire up, and then just made our connection with our spade connectors. Our wires did change colors, so our running light is going to be our white with orange. And then, our brake and turn signal is gonna be the gray and purple, so go ahead splice those just as we did the other side. And then, our white wire is gonna tie into the white wire, so that's pretty easy there. And then, our green is going to tie into our diode with the purple and gray. So we'll just tie it up just like the other one and get our taillight back in place. Now I've gone ahead and put our fascia back on and I've ran our wires out here. So now we need to make this connection and it's gonna be pretty easy to do. So we're gonna first see we have our six pole here. And there's gonna be small little Phillips screws and those are gonna be where we put our wiring. There's gonna be embossed letters here too that will tell you where they go. So we'll make sure to back those out, not all the way, but that's gonna allow us to get our wires in. So we're gonna wanna strip back just a little bit of each wire, that way we can plug them in. And before I strip 'em, I'm gonna just go ahead and take our boot, and we're gonna just slide this down kind of out of the way and that way it's gonna make it a little easier not to fray the wires once we strip 'em. And during this process, if you do have a charge line or really all of these, you're gonna wanna make sure that you're not attached to the power. So just make sure you don't have your fuse in your fuse holder on your braking system. And also if you do have that charge line, make sure you're disconnected. You don't wanna arc any electricity. But, again, just kinda stripping these back enough to where we can slide these into those receptacles. So I'm gonna start by hooking these up and I'll walk you through where each of them go. So A pointing to this center here, that's gonna be your accessory which is gonna be our 12-volt power supply on our charge line. So this will go in this center one here, so just slide that in. And then, you're gonna wanna tighten this down. Not too terribly tight, you don't wanna damage the wires. But you should get it nice and snug to where it's not gonna pull out. So we have that one attached. The next one I'm gonna do is gonna be, we have our TM at the 12 o'clock position. That's gonna be our tail markers and that's gonna be our brown wire, so I'll get that one attached. So attaching it, pretty simple. We're just gonna repeat that same process for the rest of the wires, but according to our little embossed letters here. So TM, tail markers, is gonna be our brown. GD is gonna be our ground, so that's our white wire. And then, we have our LT for left turn signal, that's gonna be yellow. Then we have RT for right turn signal, which is our green. Now the S we're not gonna be using it here and we actually don't have another wire to go there. So I'm gonna go ahead to hook 'em up just like I did here on our 12-volt supply, and then we can go from there. With these all in place, I'm gonna go back with just a little dielectric grease here and I'm just gonna kind of put it in each receptacle there. It's just gonna make a little bit more of a protected connection here. So you can kind of go heavy on this. And then, we can slide our boot over. And then, I'm gonna just take my electrical tape and tape this up to where it's gonna be nice and sealed here, but also just kind of tighten this area up. That way we don't have any water or moisture getting in there. And then, also if you have some wire loom, you can kind of just make it a little bit cleaner by tucking those in. That way you're not seeing all the colored wires feeding back. Now if you need to pick up some wire loom, extra from your kit, we actually have some available here at etrailer, and it does just kind of protect the wires, but it also just gives it a cleaner look overall. Instead of having wires kind of go everywhere, it keeps 'em nice and contained. So now we're just gonna take our little mounting plate here for our sig pull and put it on our base plate with just a self-tapping screw here. We're gonna just zip this into that metal and that's gonna hold it in place. So with that mounted up, we do have our diode wiring complete. But with the Maverick, since the taillights share a turn signal and brake light, you don't wanna have that override each signal. So the way to fix that is gonna be installing a brake light relay, and we have one installed here and I'm gonna show you how I did that. So here we have our brake light relay. And you can see that it is pretty small here, but you have wires coming off and it can get a little bit tricky getting to figure out where they all go. But let's break these wires down. So our white, this is just gonna be a ground. And I have a ring terminal that I attached to it. And there's gonna be a few different points of attachment. If you need to find one, there's a factory nut that you can take off and use that. So just make sure that it's grounded to something that's part of the chassis. And our green wire, we're not gonna be using that. So I just cut that and taped it up. We also have this red wire, which I've extended with a little bit of extra red wire that we had here, and this is gonna run to our brown wire on our diode wiring. So I passed this up through the firewall and made that attachment in the engine bay just to make it a little bit easier. And then, we also have our black and blue wires. Now these ones are going to tie into the actual brake light switch wiring that goes to the little plunger that's on the brake pedal, and that's gonna give us our brake signal. Now there's gonna be a purple and white wire, there's actually gonna be two of 'em, and you're gonna wanna cut those and attach two of 'em at each end. So then you have one that's closer to the plunger side, and then you have the other one that also runs into the wiring harness. And that's where you need to make sure that your blue one is gonna go to your connector side, and then your black one is gonna go into that wiring harness that feeds back into the main wiring. So we've gone ahead and taken those purple and white wires and we just cut those in half. Now I stripped those back and put them in a butt connector on both sides. So with those two butt connectors on there, you just need to determine where the blue and black goes. So trace the wires, and one of them will feed back to the plunger on the brake pedal, that is gonna be your blue wire where you attach it. And then, the other butt connector will get the black wire. And just trace that back, and it should go to the main wiring harness which you'll see tucked up there. So that red wire that I extended, you can see I've butt connected into the brown. And we just made that connection here with our heat shrink butt connector. So now I'm just gonna go back and clean up my wires. And you'll see on the plug here, we have a hole that you can either use a stud that's up there, you can self-tap it, or you can zip tie it up to a nice safe location. But we'll get all these wires cleaned up. And that was a look and installation of the Roadmaster Diode Wiring on a 2022 Ford Maverick..
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