Draw-Tite 5th Wheel/Gooseneck Wiring Harness 7-Pole - GM, Ford, Dodge, Nissan, Toyota w/ Factory Tow

Video Transcript for Installing the Draw-Tite 5th Wheel/Gooseneck Wiring Harness 7-Pole on your 2019 Ram 2500

Rob: Hey, everybody. Rob here at etrailer.com. Today, we're going to be taking a look at the Draw-Tite fifth wheel and gooseneck wiring harness on our 2019 Ram 2500. Now, our Draw-Tite is going to give us a seven-way connector in the bed of our truck, so whenever we hook up our gooseneck, it's going to prevent us from having to drape the cord over the tailgate and go to the bumper. Because a lot of times, we don't even have that much room or that long of wiring, to where it can come back over and go all the way over to the passenger side, where our factory wiring is. But this way, it's just really convenient, really easy because whenever we hook up, we can simply just plug in our wiring, close the tailgate, and we're ready to go.

It does have a nice spring-loaded door, so we don't have to worry about dirt and debris getting in there, if we forget to close it, because it will close right on its own.Now, if we look on the inside, it does have a gasket in there, so it is going to help, even if it does have water running in the bed, it is going to help keep it out from the actual connectors itself. Now, I think one of the best things about our wiring is the fact that we're not going to be losing anything. We are gaining a socket in the bed of our truck, but we are still able to use the factory seven-way at the bumper. So again, now we have two working seven-ways, and they're going to be fully functioning. So if you have a 12-volt hot source at the back, it'll work in here, as well as all your lights, your tail lights, your turn signals, brake lights, backup lights, as well, if you have a brake controller in your truck, it's going to feed this circuit too.So that way, whether you're doing a bumper pull, and you have it plugged into the bumper, or you're pulling your gooseneck, you can make sure that the lights and the brake controller is working on your trailer.

The installation is extremely straight-forward. Just simply need to find where we want to Mount our seven-way in the bed of our truck, we're going to need to drill a hole so we can put a plug in place, and then we'd route the wiring over to the seven-way at the back of the bumper. And then getting everything hooked up is as simple as unplugging the factory wiring and plugging our new harness in line with it because it's going to use a T-connector. So we're not going to have to cut or splice any wires on our truck. In fact, let's go ahead and show you how we got everything installed.To begin our installation, we want to find a spot where we want to mount our seven-way.

Now, in our Ram, we're going to be mounting it right here towards the back, so we have really easy access to plug in our wiring when we hook up our gooseneck. Now, in your instructions, they're going to have you drill a two-inch hole. Now, if we use a two-inch hole saw, we've found that it really doesn't fit over the socket, and the harness isn't going to fit through. So I'm going to use a two-and-one-quarter-inch hole saw, and you can see it's just big enough to fit over the wiring that has to go through the hole. So again, even though the instructions say to use a two-inch, the tabs on the wiring will not fit through there, so I'm just going to go a little bit larger.Now, before I make the final hole, I'm actually going to drill a pilot hole through there, make sure it's centered and put where I want, and it's not a bad idea to double check coming from underneath that you have enough room while you're drilling because we don't want to drill into the outside of our truck.

So I'm going to take my pilot bit, and I'm going to drill a hole right in about the center of where I want my socket mounted. And again, you want to be extremely careful not to push too hard and have that drill bit go out to the outside of the fender. So now, I'll take my hole saw, and we'll drill through and cut out the final size.Now, you can see here, we actually have another piece of metal there. We are going to have to cut that piece out. So keep that in mind, depending on where you're mounting it, you do need room for the entire hole to be open, so I'm going to go ahead and continue using my hole saw to cut this section out. Now, we can at least test fit our socket, and you can see the entire hole is going to be covered up, so even though we went a little bit oversized, we can still make sure that we're not going to have any gaps and have to worry about anything. Now, there's not too many sharp edges or burrs on here, but I'm still going to come back with a file, make sure there's no extremely sharp edges, just go around the edge and clean it up a little bit.I don't like to leave any exposed metal on here, so I'm going to come back with a little bit of spray paint and cover the exposed edges. Now, we have a spray-in bed liner in our truck, and the socket does cover everything up, but we're going to be using black spray paint. That way, if it does get a little bit of over-spray, you won't notice it. Now, at this point, we want to take our connector, our wiring harness that has the two connectors on the end of it, and we'll start feeding it down through the hole we just made. And you kind of need to work one end in, so you can get the other one in. And we want to feed as much of the wiring as we can down until we can get towards the end. And what I like to do, just so I don't lose the wiring in the hole, is I'm just going to go ahead and find the socket, plug it in, make sure it locks in place. Now, even if the wiring does fall, it can't fall all the way in.Now that we have our harness in place, we want to get our socket positioned. And I'm going to come back with a one-eighth-inch drill bit, and I'm going to drill a pilot hole in one of the corners. You can move it out of the way once you get a little mark. Now that we have that pilot hole drilled, we're going to grab the hardware, and we can secure down one hole and then continue to mark out the rest of them and drill out the holes and put the hardware in place. And kit's going to come with self-tapping screws, but I always find it easier if we get the socket in place and drill a pilot hole, that way we don't have to use a screw to make the hole itself, which makes it a little bit easier for it to get it started. And it also kind of holds the socket, and if it's not quite level, we can still make our adjustments as needed.So now that we have that one in, we'll just repeat the process three more times and get the rest of the hardware in. So our wiring came down right in the fender well back here, and now we want to route our two connectors at the end of the harness towards the seven-way at the back of the bumper. So I'm just going to take the same path that most of the factory wires are going. I'll go over the support right here and start routing it over to the passenger side of the bumper because that's where our factory seven-way is. I'll just take some of the slack out. And I always like to leave everything kind of loose, just to make sure that it is going to reach, then we can always come back and tie everything up using some zip ties. So our factory seven-way is going to be just to the passenger side of where our license plate is on the bumper. There's a little tab here. We're going to squeeze that, and that'll release it, then we'll pull back to disconnect it.Now, plugging in our seven-way is going to be extremely easy. We're just going to take the male end, plug into female, then the female end and plug it into the male end. Just make sure everything locks into place. And then again, just take some time, take some zip ties, and we can tie up the excess wires. You do want to kind of pay attention to how you tie them up because we do have our spare out of the way right now. It's not required, but we just got done putting our gooseneck in, so we want to make sure that we have enough room back here, while we're tying it up, that it doesn't interfere with our spare tire.Now, the final step of our installation is going to be testing all the circuits and make sure they work properly. So I have my seven-way tester plugged in, and if you need one of these, you can pick it up here at etrailer.com. Now, we can already see that our 12 volt is lit up, so we are getting 12 volts in the bed, as well as the back of the bumper. We can start cycling through our lights. Here, we can see that our taillight function is working, the left turn, the right turn, and our brakes.Now, if I hit the manual override, we can also see that the brake controller port is sending a signal back as well, which is definitely a good thing if we have our gooseneck hooked up. But with all of our circuits working properly, we're ready to hit the road. But again, I'm Rob here at etrailer.com, and that'll finish up your look at the Draw-Tite fifth wheel and gooseneck wiring kit on our 2019 Ram 2500.