Wesbar Wishbone Wiring Harness with 4-Pole Flat Trailer Connector - Trailer End - 18" Long

Video Transcript for Wesbar Wishbone 4-Pole Flat Trailer Connector Wiring Harness Review

Ryan: Hey everybody, my name's Ryan. And here at etrailer, we install, test, fit, and review a lot of different parts. That way we can try to answer any questions, those of you might have. And that's exactly what we're doing here today on our trailer. We're going to be taking a look at, and showing you how to install the wesbar wishbone wiring harness. So, when it comes to trailer wiring, a lot of times, you'll see just this portion here, where you plug into your tow vehicle.

Tends to get damaged, just tends to get broken first. Whether it gets pinched, damaged that way, or just corroded. This portion here is usually always out on elements, so it's the first ago. And really don't make sense to replace your whole entire trailer harness, if you can get away with just putting a new end on it.And that's exactly what we did here today. I have the old portion right here.

And as you can see, it has seen better days. It's been tapped into a few times, and the ground terminal on a four way connector was actually missing, and they bypass it here with a separate wire, and this is not ideal. You don't want to have to deal with any of that. This is just.. Something is just waiting to break on this.

At the end of the day, it's important that our lights are going to be working properly. That way, we're safe, legal, and other people know what we're doing when we're driving down the road. So, this connector in, was the perfect solution to our problem. So, this is what's called a wishbone style connector. And the end of it, is just going to be your standard old classic four way connector.So, is super common.

Nothing really special there. However, on the back of it, we're going to have five wires coming out, instead of your four. So you're going to have your right turn, your left turn, your tail lights, and your ground. And the green and yellow are also going to control your brakes. But with that being said, the reason for two taillight wires, is so you can run each wire all way to the back individually. As opposed to having one taillight wire, and then once you get towards the back of your trailer where your lights are, you would have to essentially use a jumper wire.So, kind of connecting to that original wire, and run another one over to the other side just to get both your taillights to work. And this is nice, because it'll eliminate that. So, makes it a little more simple, and in my opinion, too easier to diagnose in the future, if you do have a lighting issue. You only have one wire to work with on each side, as opposed to trying to chase it back down to very end, and where it's tapped into, if that makes sense.So, a little more straightforward. Now, keep in mind, this is just the pigtail end. So, it's not the whole harness. Upon further inspection of our trailer, the rest of the harness was good, so we didn't want to replace it all. But if yours is bad, we actually make kits available here at each trailer. That gives you the same end with a lot of wiring. So, if you do need to redo the whole trailer, that's an option for you as well. So, one little thing I do actually like about this connector, is this portion here is nice and wide, and really fit and feel like it should last awhile, and be nice and durable.It gives you a good spot to kind of grab and plug it in, or disconnect it from your other four way. And that way you're not tempted to grab the wires and disconnect it that way. If you do that over time, eventually you'll damage it. So, just something small, but something that's pretty important to get some more life out of it. Speaking of keeping this in good shape, there's a couple of things you can do to help keep these terminals protected.And one of them is just use some dielectric grease. So you pop some grease on these from time to time, and that's going to keep them protected against any type of corrosion, or anything like that. And another solution too, is here's a dust cover. inaudible 00:04:13 dust cover here. So, this isn't included, but you can grab it separately. That way when it's outside, you're not using it, you can put that cover over it. And that's just another line of protection to help keep moisture and things like that from tearing up your connectors there.So, the harness itself is 18 inches long. So, it gives you quite a bit of wire, and shouldn't really have any issues there. As far as getting it connected, the wiring is 12 gauge. So that's a pretty typical size, really common, and should match up really well to your existing trailer wiring. Now, as far as getting this hooked up, it's pretty easy, but there are a few things you're going to need. Chances are pretty good you're going to need some buck connectors, a ring terminal that we can ground your wire to the trailer itself. And what I did as well, I'll just use some of this wire loom, just to help kind of clean up and install look, and give our wires just an extra layer of protection.Now, as far as the installation goes, it's pretty straightforward, especially if you have your old connectors still attached. You're just going to more or less match everything up, color for color. So, it shouldn't take you a whole lot of time, or give you too many issues. Speaking of which, let's go ahead and do that together now. So, to begin our installation, what's you're first going to want to do, is cut off your existing pig tail. So, we're going to do is grab our original wiring here, and strip back the ends. Now, something I do want to mention, your trailer might be set up just a little bit different as far as the color combination of wires go. So, it might not be a bad idea before you cut that pigtail off, just to kind of make a mental note of what color wire is going where, and so on.So, you can take a photograph of it, or just jot it down on a piece of paper. Something just to get habit to practice that way, if you're unsure a little bit down the road, at least you have something to reference. So, I just stripped back all the ends of our installation here. And then what we're going to do, is put on some buck connectors. So you are going to have to pick these up separately. You can find them here at etrailer. These are actually heat shrinks, and I highly suggest using these. The ends will seal up and keep any moisture out that way, our connection point here will be protected. They just slide over the end, and then they just get crimped down. So let me do that same thing for my three remaining wires here.Now we can grab our new pigtail and get it all hooked up. So, these ends actually come pre-stripped, and whether your trailer is wired up the same as this one or not, this will obviously always be the same. So, we'll kind of run down what each wire does here. So if you look, our green wire is going to control our right turn signal. The Brown wire that's running right alongside the green, is going to be for the right side of the trailer for the taillights. Same thing with this and more or less, the yellow wire's going to control the left side of our trailer. And the brown wire connected to the yellow wire there, that's also going to be for the left side. And that leaves one white wire. This is just going to be our ground. This ground wire, we're not going to be connecting to our existing trailer wiring.This is actually just going to go to the frame of the trailer itself. So, we're going to wait to do this one last. Now in our case, our green wire here, we'll go to the green wire on our original wiring. So we'll plug that inaudible 00:08:11 into the buck connector, and crimp it down. The Brown wire here, that's next to our green, that's going to go to this white wire here. Just slide that in, crimp it down. Our yellow wire will get connected to the yellow wire on our trailer. So, the brown wire here that runs next to our yellow, on our new harness, that's going to go to the brown wire on our trailer. So I'll get this last one crimped down, and then I can come back with a heat source, and shrink up all of these ends.So when you're using your heat gun to seal up these ends, after a few seconds, you'll notice them to kind of start to shrink. And once they're completely shrunk, you know that we're good, and we can move on to the other end. So, this is what the buck connectors will look like, once you have them shrunk down. And with that being said, now we can work on our ground wire, which is this white wire here that goes to our new connector plug. Now, as I mentioned this going to get attached to the trailer frame, and our case, that wire's a little too short. And if that's your case as well, not really a big deal. I'm just going to grab a few foot of extra right wiring. You can pick this up here at etrailer, and just extend that wire.That way, we're not trying to deal with everything being real tight, and hard to work with. We want to keep things simple, and I'm just going to extend the wire again, just using a buck connector. This will work just like the other ones, with that crimps, that and come back and seal up the heat shrink, and then we can find a good spot to attach our ground wire. So what I figured I'm going to do, is just to use our existing ground here on our trailer frame. And what you want to make sure of, if your trailer is rusty like this one, you can you use a wire wheel or some sandpaper, something like that, and just clean up that metal, so we get a good connection. That being said, we'll take our wire, and I'm going to use a ring terminal, and crimp that on.Then I'm going to use a new self tapping screw to secure it. And you can find both these here at etrailer. So lets get that. Started in there by hand somewhat, come back with the impact and run it down. So now that we have everything hooked up, it's a good idea to test our wiring, that way we know it's working properly. I suggest using a tester box like this, to do that. You can use your tow vehicle, but keep in mind, if you do happen to have an issue, it could be related to your tow vehicle. So, by using a box like this, that kind of eliminates that there.But would that being said, I plugged in, I'll go ahead and turn it on, and run through all of our lighting functions. So, we'll go ahead and power up our tail lights. We'll try our left turn signal, our right turn signal, and our brake lights. So now that I've verified everything is working, what I went ahead and did, is I see some electrical tape, and just really taped everything up nice and tight. And just to help clean up our install a little bit, I'm going to need some wire loom, and keep everything covered. If you want to do this as well, you can always grab some loom right here at etrailer. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the wesbar wishbone style wiring harness..