Deka Wire - Jacketed 7-Wire - per Foot

Video Transcript for Deka Jacketed 7-Wire Review

Hi there, neighbors. Today, we're going to be taking a look at Deka's jacketed seven wire cable. It's available by the foot, so you can just get as long as you need. We used our Deka wire here to replace our old seven way here that's all busted up. You can see our wires are exposed. We had some shorting issues.

There's all kinds of electrical tape on it to patch it up. But with our new wire here, everything is sealed nicely inside the heavy, thick jacket, and having that heavy, thick jacket on it also makes it stay inside of our seven way connector better as the cable release there holds it in nice and tight and same with the other end where we've got it hooked to our junction box. Keeping everything sealed like this all the way down our cable is just going to ensure that we have long lasting seven way operation on our trailer.So it's going to be ready to use it when camping season comes around. Inside, we do have seven wires with your typical wire colors for trailer connections. Six of those are going to be a 12 gauge wiring, but our white wire inside, which is typically used for ground is going to be thicker at 10 gauge.

And I liked that they provided a thicker wire for our ground because everything that we power on our trailer has to use that ground circuit to make it back to the battery in our vehicle. The wires inside are going to be stranded wiring, which means it should have no problem flexing around and they will take a maximum of 50 volts on our circuits. So this wire is going to be great for making repairs on the seven way wiring for your utility trailers, your car haulers, your pop-up campers, as well as your fifth wheels.We're going to show you how to take a new seven way and get it all wired up, as well as upgrading our trailer from the wiring that just runs down to the frame to a junction box, so we can easily add accessories and test things in the future. We're going to start by mounting up our junction box. We're going to be placing ours underneath the storage area here for where you'd have your batteries.

We can put it right here on the frame, and we're just going to be using some self-tapping screws to get it mounted up. These don't come included with the junction box, but you can pick some up at your local hardware store. The best place to mount your junction box is somewhere where it's going to be out of the way, but also protected against anything that's going to hit it. So typically on the inside of your A-frames is a great place, or if you want to put it underneath the trailer on the frame, that's another good spot as well.It kind of depends on where your wiring's located, where you might want to do that. Since ours is popping out of the hole in the frame here, putting it near there's a great option, because we can easily bring it right out of that frame, into the box here, and then wire up our new seven pole connector and everything right to the box.

Then this will give us an easy access point for adding any accessories or performing any testing. If we have to do any maintenance on the trailer. We're just going to run our self-tappers in. So get it mounted up. It's going to hold it in the place where we want it and just start running them in.We now need to access the wiring here so we can bring it into the junction box to start making our connections. So you may need to peel back some sheathing and things like that. So we're going to go ahead and feel some back here so we can get that off or you just peel it back. However your sheathing may be set up. We need to make sure we've got enough length to get into our box and make all the connections. And it looks like that should be plenty about there. And we can go ahead and cut all our wires. Now, if you have a battery hooked up or anything, you may want to disconnect your battery or turn off your battery disconnect. However you need to do it to ensure you don't accidentally short out your powers and grounds and things like that. We don't have a battery on our trailer right now, so we're okay. We're just going to go ahead and cut all these.Now that we've got everything cut, we can strip back each one of the wires that we just cut. We can now take each of the wires that we stripped back. And we're going to crimp on one of the small ring terminals that come included with your junction box. We only have six here. You may have seven on yours. If you have a circuit for backup lights on your trailer, we do not on this one. We're just going to repeat that process until they're all crimped. On your thicker wires, it may be easier to get their yellow ones on there as they are ever so slightly bigger than our black ones.Now, most of your wiring does have sheathing on it, but if you have a section that doesn't, you may want to wrap it in electrical tape. I'm just wrapping a small section here for where it's going to pass through the junction box because you do clamp it down tight. So it will just give us a little bit more solid surface to clamp to. We do have multiple access points on our junction box. They just slide out and these are where we can slide our wiring in. You'll also have on the edges,, clamps that hold our wiring in place to act as a relief break. So we're going to go ahead and remove the screws on the clamps so we can put our wiring in.We can really just take off the one screw if you want. And then you can just kind of twist this piece aside. you do also receive new grommets that come in your kit that will slide in place where the old ones were, but these ones have a hole in them. So you can pass all your wiring through there as well. And we will just start color matching our wires to the appropriate stuts. Slide them all down underneath there to keep them out of the way. After we remove the nut, there's also a washer on there, slide that off and you can slide your wire on and then follow it up with the washer and a nut. We're just going to leave it loose for now because we are going to have to add more. That's just going to hold it in place. We're going to now just follow it down the line just matching up our wires.Once you've got everything connected here, when you wire up your seven way and you want to make sure you match all your functions appropriately for how they're hooked up to your seven way end. Now that we've got everything loosely connected here on this side, we can start building our new seven way end that we're going to connect over here. You can reuse your old one if there was nothing wrong with it, where you had cut it, you can just then re splice it back up, matching those wire colors back up. But since ours was damaged, we're going to be making a whole new one. And we'll go ahead and walk you through that too.Here, we've got our old seven way connector. You can see it's all busted up. We're going to be making a new one. And the easiest way to make a new connector is to just wire it up exactly as your old connector was, just use it as a reference if you can. So since we still have something left, we can use it. And if not, then you can just wire it up per function. And we'll go over the functions at the end for each one of the outputs. So that way, if you don't have a reference with your old one, you can make your own completely new. There are a couple of screws, usually, that hold the wires in place. And there is typically another screw located up here on your seven way that parts been busted out on this one. So there's nothing holding that part there, but this holds our wires. So we do need to loosen this up back here, and that will allow you to push the wires forward, revealing the backside of your connector.And this is where we're just going to start using this as our reference and wiring everything up. We're going to go ahead and take our connector and loosen up the bars, screw here at the back. Let's get that out of the way. Now, if you flip it over, there's a small set screw there. We'll also need to take that out. In a lot of cases, you won't have to take it all the way out. You can just loosen it up and that'll be enough to slide the front portion out. So then we're going to go ahead and take our wire, feed it in through the back.Go ahead and take that out as well and make it a little bit easier getting the wire fed in and our wire should push the end out just like that. Since we took that set, screw loose. We're just going to go ahead and just keep pushing it through a little bit until we've got enough to where we can work with our wire here. It's a little bit easier to slide it through first, before cutting it. And that way we also can ensure that down inside of here, we're going to have the sheathing where we're going to be pinching it down. So we really don't want to strip back the wires here too far. I'm only going to go probably about to there, and we're just going to use our razor knife to cut that.We can go ahead and peel it back. And then we're just going to use our wire cutters here to just snip the rest of this off. You just want to be careful not to cut your wires. Now that we've got all of our wires exposed, we're going to strip back each one of these wires. So here we've got our two ends holding them side by side so we can compare the two. And we're just going to start making connections. Easiest thing to do is to just pick one color and then just start with that one. That way you can just work your way around from there. So if we match them up, we can see black is going to this one here, so we're just going to start hooking our black wire up there.This is going to be our power circuit for the auxiliary power to charge the battery. There is a small plate underneath the screw. You need to make sure that your wire gets pinched between the plate when you tighten it back down. I'm just going to slide that up in there and then tighten it up. Now that we've got that one secure, we're just going to use our old connector here as a reference and just work our way around connecting the rest of the wires. So we're going to go ahead and go counter-clockwise and the next one we have here is green.So we're going to just move on with enough of our green, following that order. And then moving counter-clockwise, we move on to our green wire, which is our taillight running circuit. We then move on to the red next, which is our left turn stop circuit. Next is our white, which is ground then blue, which is our brake signal circuit for our brake controller. And we have Brown after that, which is going to be our right turn circuit. And then lastly, we have the yellow wire, which is in the center, and that is for our backup light circuit. With everything connected, we just slide the two ends back together, and then we can start reassembling the lock in the set screw.We're now going to take the other end of our new seven pole wire. We're going to strip back some of the sheathing and separate out the wires and then strip them back so we can put it into our junction box. You need to make sure all of our wires are going to reach. So we're going to take off a decent little section, probably about six inches. And we're just going to take that right off. When I'm cutting, I'm not cutting very deep. I actually run my finger down it to prevent the blade from going too deep. It's an easy way to control it, because once you score it like that, even if you didn't tell all the way through a lot of times, you can just pull it off like that. And we're going to use our snips again, to cut off any of the sheathing here.Now, just like on the trailer side, we're going to take each of these wires we stripped back and we're going to crimp on a ring terminals so we can connect it to the junction box. I've gone ahead and removed the grommet from where I want to place my new seven pole wiring and slid on the grommet that has the hole in it that comes in your kit. Go ahead and bring it around. We'll need to do just like we did before and loosen up the screws here on the hold downs. One of them was going to have to come completely out. We've got our wiring slid in. We're just going to tighten that clamp back down.I'm just kind of working back and forth, tighten it down evenly. And now we can connect all of our wires to the appropriate spots here on our junction box. Again, the biggest thing is that the functions are matching, not the wire colors. For this particular one here, I did wire it in a way that our wire colors are going to match up with your appropriate function. So I can just match up each of my wire colors. And since you're adding your own junction box, I highly recommend that you set up so that your wires match up properly with the appropriate colors. It just makes things easier in the future. So we'll just remove the nut and washer that we had loosely installed from before. And we're just going to slide each one on and then reattach the circuit with that washer and nut. We're just going to do that all the way down and then we'll come back and finish tightening them once we've got each one put in place.It's a little bit easier to work with your wires while everything's still a little bit loose. We can now go back and tighten them all up, once we've made all of our connections. We're going to use an eight millimeter socket to tighten down the nuts. I find it easiest for you to start doing it with the socket by hand, and then you can go back with your ratchet and finish snugging it down afterwards. With our yellow one there, you'll see, it just has the single wire going to it. That's coming from our seven way. But what's nice about that is that if we wanted to, we could easily add reverse lights to our trailer, and we've already got a stud right there that we can wire the lights up to and they're ready to work. Now that we've got all of our connections made, we can test it out to make sure everything's working properly.We're going to go ahead and hook it up to our tester, but if you wanted to, you could also hook it up to your truck to make sure everything's working properly. We've got our tester plugged in. Now we're just going to run through the functions. We've got our tail lights there. We have our left turn, our right turn, as well as our brake lights. Now for our electric brakes and 12 volt backup light circuits, it's actually easier to test those at the junction box. Since we don't have backup lights and we can't physically see the electric brakes and everything, we can just test it here on the box. We wired up our blue wire for the electric brakes. So I'm just going to go ahead and turn those on and we can see it's powered up. Now I turned it off, on. So our electric brake circuit is working properly.We wired up the black wire to our 12 volt power circuit. So we're just going to come over here to this. This is where we would charge our batteries from this, but the batteries are removed from this so we can't test that either. But when we turned it on, we can see it lights our test light, showing that we do have power here on our 12 volt charge circuit. And lastly is our reverse circuit, which we don't have reverse lights on here. That's this blown yellow pin, and we're going to go ahead and set the tester to backup lights and then test that.And that's all working properly as well. So we've tested all the functions that our trailer has and they're all working. Then we tested the extra pins for accessories we can add in the future and all of those are working properly. With everything all wired up, we can put our cover back on. I'm just going to double-check all of our grommets and make sure they're in place, because they do like to slide around on you when you're working inside the box. Now that I've made sure all those are in place, we can just slide our cover on. Then we'll attach it using the included screws. With our new wire hooked up our seven way is fully functioning and our installation's complete. And that completes our look at Deka's jacketed seven wire cable..