Roadmaster Tail Light Wiring Kit with Bulbs

Video Transcript for Roadmaster Tail Light Wiring Kit Installation - 2021 Chevrolet Spark

Hey everyone. Shane here with etrailer.com. Today I have a 2021 Chevrolet Spark. I'm gonna walk through how to install the Roadmaster Bulb and Socket kit. What the bulb and socket kit allows you to do is allows you to transfer your light signals from your motor home to the back of your vehicle while it's being flat-towed so that you're safe. Everybody knows what you're doing, whether that's braking, turning or driving at night.

What's different about this kit from your typical diode kit is it actually has a bulb that requires you to drill a hole into your light. And it just allows you to run 4-pole wire to the front and hook 4-pole into your RV so you're getting the proper light functions. Once it's installed, you don't have anything to do other than hook-up the umbilical cord from the front of our vehicle to our motor home. There are five main components to flat tow any vehicle, typically. You have your base plate which monster the chassis of the vehicle to give you a solid connection point for your tow bar.

You have your tow bar which gives you that connection from your base plate to your motor home, your safety cables which are a secondary safety device, your wiring which allows the vehicle to receive light functions from the motor home and a braking system. Now for this vehicle, because it's under 3000 pounds it doesn't require the braking system. So what we have installed on this vehicle is the base plate and the wiring. There is one more component for the '21 Chevy Spark that is required. And that's gonna be a battery disconnect.

Battery disconnect is by Roadmaster. You can find it here at etrailer. What that allows you to do because the key needs to stay in the ignition, so the steering wheel doesn't lock, that allows you to disconnect the battery so you don't wear it down every point in the vehicle. Another thing to consider when you're flat towing your vehicle, when you're wanting to set up your vehicle to flat tow is a distance of where your base plate sits on your vehicle and where the center of your hitch sits on your RV. What we want is you want that number to be within three inches.

So what you would do is you'd measure from the ground to the center of your hitch. Get that measurement. The measurement for our Spark to the center of where this pin goes through, where our tow bar meets our base plate is 16 1/2 inches. If the number for the center of your hitch is within that three inches high, then you're good to go. If it's over that, then you're gonna need a high-low adapter. You can find that here at etrailer. Another thing that separates this kit from a diode wiring kit is it doesn't require you to tap into or splice into the factory wiring behind the taillights. Simply install the bulb, the wire gets ran to the front of the vehicle and as I mentioned, all you do is connect your umbilical cord and it gives you your light functions at the back of your vehicle. This is gonna be our umbilical that's gonna come with your bulb and socket kit. Again, this is a connect from your RV to the front of the vehicle. This is our plug, this gives us our 4-pole plug wiring to go from here, back and connect to each one of our bulbs. Each one of our 4-pole ends is gonna come with a dust cap. So when we're not using it, we can keep any dirt and debris from getting inside the connections. As far as the installation process, it's pretty simple and straightforward. You're gonna run your wire from the front of the vehicle to the back. You're gonna split it from one light to the other, install your lights inside each one of your factory tail lights, connect the wires and you're basically ready to go. Now we've gone over some of the features. Let's walk through how to get it installed. Now you've noticed that we have our fascia off already. Ideally, what you wanna do is if you're installing your base plate which is what we just got done doing, you wanna install your wiring, braking system, any of that at the same time, so that when your fascia is off, it's gonna make it a lot easier to run everything up in the front. And then when you put your fascia back on you can trim everything on the fascia all at one time. We're gonna take one end of our wiring harness and we're gonna attach it to our base plate wherever in the area where we're gonna be installing our wiring. This base plate happens to have two prongs on it for the wiring. So I took a zip tie and just zip tied it to it. Now, if your RV does not have a 4-pole or 7-pole plug, the opposite end is gonna have a 4-pole on it. You're gonna take about three foot of it, you're gonna cut it off. This end will get wired to your RV. And then the kit comes with a tether to go from here to this end in between the two vehicles, our vehicle or our RV that this owner has already has a 7-pole plug on it. So what we're gonna do is we're not gonna be using this. We're just gonna cut it off and route this to the back of the vehicle. Let me get it done real quick and I'll show you how I did it. It really doesn't matter which side you start, passenger side or driver's side. I normally go to the driver's side. I chose to go to the passenger side because my exhaust is on this side or on my driver's side. And I really have nowhere to attach my wire going back. On the passenger side, underneath the vehicle, we have hard lines that run from the front to the back. So it makes it very easy to zip tie your wire up there. What I did, I did tie it across the top of my base plate, came to the outside because we have a bunch of hoses and stuff and belts here. We wanna make sure we're staying away from anything hot or moving. On the outside, when in between my fender well and the frame rail back to the inside of the frame rail. Right up here, that's where I came in. We have a hard line right here. Let me see where my zip tie is. I came straight across to this hard line. Zip tied it here, turn my line straight down. Right here. So I just zip tied right along the way here. Once across, I ziptied to this hard line. Ziptied it up here and then came right up here to this hard line. Ziptied it here. Next we need to get our wiring ready to go up to our taillight. And then across to our driver's side taillight. Next we're gonna separate all of our wires. Our green, brown, and white, we're gonna be taking up to our passenger side. Yellow, we are gonna run it over to the driver's side. Now you'll notice there's quite a bit of extra here for this size vehicle. We're not gonna cut it short yet because what we're gonna end up having to do is there a brown or green, or I'm sorry, a brown or white, once we get them connected to the bulb that's going in the tail light, we're gonna use the extra wire as a jumper to go over to the other side. So we're gonna need all the links we can get. And then we can cut off all of our excess later on. So now that we've got them separated, I've got my yellow wire just ran over there just so it's not hanging out all over the place. We'll go ahead and get our taillights removed and get these three ran through our passenger side. We'll go ahead and remove both of our taillights. Phillips head screwdriver, remove the two bolts here. Trim panel tool and make it a little bit easier. We're gonna go right in between the body and the edge of the light. And we're just gonna pry straight backwards. We're gonna take our three bulbs and twist. Twist them up, just like that. We'll repeat the same thing on the other side. Next, we have to get our wires up to our taillight pocket here. It's open right behind the fascia. If you have a wire hanger or anything like that can use that. What I like to do is piece of string with a nut on it. I'm just gonna drop it down so it comes out the bottom. Just like that. Take our brown, white and green wire. We can just kind of tie them on there. Pull them up. After looking at it a little bit closer, looking at the back where the fascia meets the bumper beam, I decided I'm gonna go ahead and run all four of them up here. And rather than taking my two jumper wires and running them down and over, I'm gonna take out this screw and that screw when I get to it, I'm just gonna tuck them right behind my fascia and go straight over. So what I decided to do is where my wires ran from my last hard line that I attached them to. There's a hole in this plate. I ran all four wires through it. My bumper beam, where it attaches to my frame rail is right here and I wanted to go onto the inside of it instead of the outside, 'cause if I go on the outside, I have a chance of some from my tire kicked up and damaging my wires. So being on the inside, this will keep everything up tight. Being able to go through that hole, being on the inside that the bumper beam rail, it keeps it away from anything coming from a tire. Next thing we need to do is when you get our bulbs mounted inside our taillights. This is gonna be the the actual top of our taillight. This part is gonna be the bottom of the top section, if that makes sense. This is our top bolt. We had to come in through the bottom of it, go around through these, we're gonna have to make a one inch hole. What I suggest doing is being very careful when you're drilling through the plastic. Cause if you using drill bits or anything that are not meant for plastic it could potentially crack this and you don't wanna do that. So just take your time with it. Actually, you wanna take some RTV silicone, if you don't have any, you can find some at etrailer. We're gonna put it around this outer edge, push down and replace you. We're gonna take some more. We're gonna go around the edge just to make sure we have plenty of coverage we don't get any water or moisture inside. While we let our silicone dry on one, we're gonna repeat the process on the other. Once your sealant is dry enough, it may take up to eight hours. Then we can start installing them back into, connect them to our wires and reinstalling our taillights. There's three wires. Black one is gonna be ground, brown is gonna be running light signal, red is gonna be your brake and turn signal. Before we start installing the light take the screw out from each side. As I mentioned earlier, take the strip and just pull it loose off this edge. That'll give you enough room to take that wire and tuck it back in there. I'm gonna go ahead and cut my wires down. I cut them about halfway. We do have some longer wires on the back of our bulb as well. Make sure they don't fall back down into the bumper. We're gonna hold on to our white and our brown. Green, we're not gonna need anymore. We're gonna take our white and brown that we just cut off. We're gonna take the white and brown in the vehicle. Strip back the ends. Put the white to white. I recommend using heat shrink butt connectors. These are gonna live outside and be prone to taking on a little bit of moisture. This will help protect your connection to keep them from corroding. We'll do the same thing with the browns. Strip back the green. We'll take our light and make sure you have the correct one. We're gonna strip back each of our wires. White to black. Green was our a break and turn to red. And of course brown and brown. We'll take our heat source and we'll shrink those up. This was completely up to you. I like to run some electrical tape around each one of my butt connectors once I get them shrunk on there. We're gonna go ahead and re-install all of our lights, taillight. I suggest getting your wires ran under that corner first. And let's go into set this in place. One second. We'll get the screw, this bottom quarter put back in because they're like covers that area that we can just install or reinstall the light. The difference between this side and the other side is we're only gonna have one wire that's gonna be double and that's gonna be our ground. So once you have your wires cut to size, cut another small length of white wire, put the two ends together like we did on the opposite side and on your butt connectors. And then this side we'll cut to length and then we're gonna add a ring terminal on it. It'll get grounded to the body. Other than that, these two just gonna get connected to the wires coming off the light. Now we're gonna test out our lights with an alternate power source. This is gonna simulate being hooked up to your RV. Tail lights, left turn, brake lights, right turn. Now we know everything's working correctly. We can go ahead, add any other components we're gonna be installing and then reinstall our fascia and then trim out all of our components that we have added. Once you re-install your fascia, you've got everything cut out, you're ready to go. That's gonna do it for look at and installation on the Roadmaster Bulb and Socket Light kit on a 2021 Chevrolet Spark..