Blue Ox Tow Bar Wiring Kit - 4 Diodes

Video Transcript for Blue Ox Tow Bar Wiring Kit Installation - 2018 Ford F-150

Speaker 1: Today on our 2018 Ford F-150, we're going to be taking a look at, and I'm going to show you how to install, the Blue Ox Tow Bar Wiring Kit, part number BX8848.What the diode kit's going to do for you, is while your Ford is being flat-towed behind your RV traveling down the road, it's going to allow you to transfer all those signals from your RV into the Ford. When it's finished, you turn on your brake lights, your running lights, your turn signals, all those are going to transfer through to the vehicle while it's being flat-towed.Now the purpose of the diodes, is to protect the factory wiring on the Ford from any back feed from the RV. And vice versa it's going to protect the RV wiring from any back feed from the Ford's wiring.As far as the installation goes, it is a pretty simple installation. You will need a light tester to test the wiring to figure out which wires are your brake wire, and your running lights, and turn signals. Other than that, all you're doing is transferring wires, running a wire from the back to the front.First thing we need to do to start our installation, is we're going to go ahead and get everything out of the package. You're going to get 12 foot of green and brown wire, and you're going to get your 4-pole wire that's going to route to the front of the vehicle.

You're going to get your four diodes, two for each taillight. Then you're going to get your female spade connectors, they're going to hook onto your diodes from your wiring. You're also going to get a butt connector, ring terminal, self-tapping screw. And then an extra white wire for your ground wire.Some of the things that you're going to need, crimpers. You're going to need, and you can just use a socket this is to get a socket wrench if you don't have a battery operated one or electric one, 5/16ths socket, and that's to remove our taillights.

You're going to need wire strippers, and you're going to need a light tester.To remove our taillight, we're going to start on our passenger side. We're going to remove this bolt, and this bolt. And we're just going to pry our light off. You want to make sure that these alignment tabs that are here, we don't break those off. Once we get that disconnected, we'll go ahead and unplug our taillight and set our light aside.Now we have a coating here.

We need to remove that, and actually if you look back here there's a little clip that's holding our wiring on. If we un-clip it, it might make it a little bit easier to work with, give us a little extra room here. Pull our wires out, pull this off a little bit more.And with our tester, we actually have our right blinker turned on right now, it's a little bit easier if you have somebody actually sit in there so you can run through all the functions at once. Now our brake signal and our right turn signal should be on the same circuit. We're just going to be using two wires.

So what we're going to do, is we have the other end of our light source, or our tester, hooked up to a ground and we're just going to push it in like this. So it's going to be our second prong, which is going to be this green wire with the orange stripe. And you're just going to do that same process for your running lights.Through testing, we determine that, as I mentioned, the green wire with the orange stripe is going to be our turn signal and brake signal. And then our blue wire with the white stripe, is going to be our running lights signal.So actually I stripped the back a little bit farther, this is a little close to your other plug. You can do it there, but I like to give myself room. So I actually went down here, I'm going to cut my wires here. It gives me plenty of room for my diodes.Go ahead and start with our, actually we can just cut them both. Strip back the ends, I'm going to add one of my spade connectors onto each one like that. We're going to do the same thing with our green wire. Take our diode, you're going to see it's going to have two ins and an out, out is going to the taillight, in is coming from the wiring. Like that, and we'll take our other blue one and plug it into one side. Same thing with this one, just like that.Then you're going to take your green and your brown wire, and if you follow it down I pushed all of it down through that hole where my factory wiring is going because the other end of this is going to be going over to the drivers side. We're going to go ahead and make these connections first though.We're going to add our spade connector once you strip back your wires. And if you remember, our blue wire with the white stripe was our running lights, which is going to be our brown. We're going to plug that in, in with our blue wire. And then our green wire's going to be our turn signal and brake lights, and we're going to plug that in with the diode with the green wire and orange stripe.Then one thing I forgot to mention, is electrical tape. I went ahead and put my wire loom back over, and I'm actually going to take these and I'm going to see if I can't tape them on here. And I'm not putting a lot of pressure on the tape, I just want to hold them in place so they're not bouncing around. Push our holder back in place. Now we can put our taillight back in.I went ahead and routed my brown and my green wire over from my passengers side. And I fed my 4-pole wiring up through the hole here on my drivers side. Now how I ran my green and my brown wire, I went up above my spare tire bracket, just ran it across the bottom of the bed basically. You just want to make sure you're staying away from anything hot or moving. I did zip-tie it to where this wire goes down to the bottom of the bed, I did zip-tie it there so it stays tight across the back. Really, it doesn't matter how you run it that's just how I did it.So now what we're going to do with our brown wire, and you remember our brown wire on our passenger side was running to our running light signal. When our vehicle's being flat-towed and we turn our running lights on in our RV, if we don't have this line or this brown wire coming from our passenger side jumping across to our drivers side, the passenger side light is the only one that's going to come on. So we need to tie this in with our brown wire on our 4-pole wiring that's going up to our 6-pole plug. We'll put them together like that. And then these will go onto our running light signal on our drivers side.Let's go ahead and strip this wire back here, this is our 4-pole wire. And then as far as our brown wire here, we're going to cut it down a little bit, twist these two together, go ahead and put on one of your spade connectors.That green wire, I'm not going to be connecting that to a diode on this side. I'm just going to connect my green wire from my 4-pole and my green wire coming from my passenger side for the blinker, together. Go ahead and cut this down, and then these we're just going to strip back a little bit, we're going to add a butt connector on them.Now your kit is going to come with a butt connector. However, I'm going to replace it with a Heat Shrink butt connector because our wiring is going to live outside of the vehicle. Go ahead and add that on to the end of our green wire, just connect our other end like that. And we'll take our heat source, and shrink the butt connector.On our drivers side we determined that this white or gray wire with that orange stripe is going to be our brake light and turn signal, and then our blue wire with the white stripe again is going to be our running lights. So then we're just going to splice them into our wiring, the same way we did the other side.Go ahead and split them. Blue wire, blue wire. Double brown. Brake light and turn signal, on your gray or on your white. Yellow and the other end of our orange and white. And our white wire's going to be our ground, strip it back, and your kit's going to come with a ring terminal, crimp that on.Now with the self-tapping screw that comes in the kit, I'm actually just going to ground my ground wire right here.Now I need to run the other end of my wiring up to the front of the vehicle. Let me get that done real quick, and I'll show you how I did it.So you can see my wire here. I went over top my frame rail, through the inside, over top of this crossbeam here, just followed my existing wiring, my factory wiring, all the way up to right here where it goes back over top my frame, and you can see it there. Just followed it all the way up to the front of the vehicle. I just ran it right along my frame rail, and you can see I ran it right up above my shock power, zip-tied it up there so it stays above it, came out to the front frame rail, just dropped it down the inside here. Now we need to figure out where we're going to mount our 6-pole plug.The only place we can really do it without actually cutting into the bumper itself, is this hard plastic that's right underneath our bumper. I did have to bend the bracket a little bit so it would sit straight. If you do it here, just remember this bumper actually stops about here so to get the nut and bolt on it, it's a short one that comes with your baseplate kit, but to get the nut up inside of there you're going to have to pull it down a little. So you can see I've got two marks where I just took a little marker marked the two holes, and then I'll put it in about like that.Now what we need to do, is we need to get our wiring through here. I like to keep it as hidden as possible. So if you see, I put on my 6-pole plug, I have my boot on, I'm actually going to drill a hole straight up right there. That way when I pull my wire through, most of it's going to be behind here.So now I'm going to give myself a little extra. I'm going to go ahead and cut this off right here, pull my plug back off, and then we'll make our connections on our plug. On the back of our plug we're going to have a rubber boot, we're going to go ahead and pull that off, we're going to slide that on skinny end first.Now if you look on the back of the plug it's going to have GE for ground, GM's going to be running lights, LT for left turn, RT for right turn. Take a Phillips or a flat head screwdriver and make sure you don't pull these all the way out because they can get lost they're small. And we'll start going around, just like that. Keep in mind that this plug does not come with this wiring kit. This kit you have to purchase this plug separate, but it can be found on our website.We're going to add some dielectric grease, which can also be found on our website. And I'm just going to kind of cover my connections here. This will help protect them, and help keep the moisture off. Slide your boot down on top, take some electrical tape an tape over the end of my boot like that. And I'm actually going to go right down the end onto my wiring. Then we can reinstall our plug.Now we're going to test out our wiring using an alternate power source. This is going to simulate being hooked up to the RV. Taillights, left turn, brake lights, right turn.That'll do it for the look at and installation on the Blue Ox Tow Bar Wiring Kit, part number BX8848, on our 2018 Ford F-150.