Roadmaster InvisiBrake Braking System Installation - 2017 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited

Products Featured in this Video

Roadmaster InvisiBrake Supplemental Braking System

217 reviews

Code: RM-8700

Retail: $1,584.94

Price:  $1,175.00

• Tow Bar Braking Systems
• Brake Systems
• Pre-Set System
• One Time Set-Up

• Fixed System
• Power Assist Brake Compatible
• Air Brakes
• Hydraulic Brakes
• Roadmaster

Get automatic, real-time braking in your towed vehicle with the InvisiBrake. Actuator box installs permanently so that you never have to remove, adjust or reactivate. System connects to RV and engages car brakes when the RV brake lights illuminate.

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How to Install the Roadmaster InvisiBrake Braking System on a 2017 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited

Today in our 2017 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited with our 2016 Forest River on a Mercedes Benz chassis RV, we'll be having a look at, and installing, the Roadmaster InvisiBrake Supplemental Braking System, part number RM-8700. Here's what our monitor light looks like installed. When our brakes are applied on our RV, and then the brakes are triggered in the Jeep, we will see the indicator light that comes on to let us know the brakes are working in the car. If a problem was to occur, and the brakes are being held on for too long inside of our Jeep, we would have an audible buzzer. When you're at a stop sign for an extended period of time, you'll notice my foot hasn't left the brakes, but our indicator light shut off. It does that so it doesn't damage the compressor inside the Jeep, because you're already stopped, but when you go back to your pedal, it turns back on. We have pulled the break away pin on the Jeep. Now you can hear the beeping sound, which indicates that there's a problem. The brakes are hanging up, or in our case, the break away pin has been pulled.

This will alert you so you can pull over safely and determine what the problem is. Here's what our InvisiBrake looks like installed inside the vehicle. As you see, we just have this one small module where we can have access to so we can adjust our pressure. When you have it pushed in, it's locked, so you can't adjust it at all. When you pull it out, you can adjust the pressure how you want it, less sensitive, less braking pressure. You can dial it back up and you get more braking pressure.

Once you have it where you want it, you can push it down and lock it in place, and you don't have to worry about it ever again. What sets this braking system apart from others . Once it's installed and you have it adjusted to where you want it, you never have to do anything ever again to enable it. There is no wires to hook up, no switches to throw. Once it's done, you're done. All you have to do is just hook up to your RV and you're ready to go. Underneath the dash is a nice compact unit that is not going to get in the way our feet at all.

There's no air cylinder in the way here that could possibly limit our foot room. We just have a pulley that's mounted to our firewall that's out of the way and will pull the cable down as necessary to enable our breaks. Okay, so, when we apply the brakes in our RV, our brakes will be applied in our jeep in the same manner. If our break away switch we're to become pulled, for some unfortunate reason of our Jeep becoming disconnected from our RV, our brakes will be applied inside the Jeep, bringing it to a slow and safe stop. Now that we've gone over some features, we'll show you how to get it installed. In order to make our installation easier, we're going to remove our driver's seat. We have a T45 torque screw right here that holds our seatbelt in place to the seat.

We'll remove this. Let her retract back up. We slide our seat back, and we have four bolts that hold our seat to the floor, one in each corner of it. These bolts are 18 mm, so we'll remove all four of them. Once we have all of our bolts removed, we can lift up on our seat. We find an electrical connector here, push down on the tab, separate the connector. With that disconnected, we can remove the seat from the vehicle and get it out of our way. With our seat out of the way, we have an appropriate spot to mount our operating unit right here. We'll just secure it directly to the floor with provided self-tapping screws. Now we're going to remove this panel right here, so we have some room to work, and remove our carpet. To do that, we'll undo a few clips. We have two right here. Use a trim panel tool to remove these. We have two more back in our passenger door area. With this pulled out enough, we can actually get this panel out now. We have another bigger clip right here on that panel. Now we can grab this panel and pull it on out. Now we'll remove our front section of carpet, here. Pull back on the back section, remove this wingnut. All right, we have two wingnuts against our firewall to hold our carpet in the forward section. Remove these. With the wingnuts removed, our carpet will just pull on out now. This is our bracket, which attaches our cable and pulley assembly to our vehicle's brake pedal. There's two sides to it. It's kind of a mirrored image here. This side, here, we want to have this on the driver's side of the vehicle. This side will be on the passenger's side of the brake pedal. We want this side here facing down towards the firewall where it has this flange. What we want to do, since there's multiple holes here, we want to try to get as tight as possible around our brake pedal arm, and having it mounted as low on the pedal as possible. We'll test these two holes out here and see if it fits. Those fit nice and tight around that and there's a little bit of slack for adjustment, which is what we want. Now that we've verified that we can use the two holes here, closest together, we can actually trim off this excess right here so we have more clearance around our feet, and we'll do that on both of our brackets so it's nice and flush. You can use a grinder for this or a cutoff wheel. I'm using the cutoff wheel on a rotary tool. Now that we have these trimmed, we can install them. For that, we'll use our little hex head machine screws, and we'll secure it with our nylon lock nuts. We're using a 5/32 Allen key to hold the screws still, and a 3/8 socket to tighten down the nut. Once we have it mostly run down, we'll position it where we need it, making sure it's centered as possible. Now that we have our bracket snugged down, you'll notice it starts to bend a little bit towards each other, around our brake pedal arm, which is fine. That's what we want. That'll keep it in position and hold it nice and tight. This is our cable assembly here, which will go onto our bracket that we mounted onto the pedal. I've already taken one of the nuts and ran it halfway down the shaft. The backside one here, near the cable, I took off. We'll slide the cable through the slot, and push the stud on the shaft through the hole. We'll take our nut, slide it up the cable, and tighten it onto the shaft. Now we need to mount our pulley to a flat spot on the firewall. When we have it in this position here, our wire will hit the pulley right in the center, which is where we want it, and when the pedal is depressed, it comes out of our bracket right here at a straight line, which is what we want. We'll secure it to the firewall with the provided self-tapping screws, doing one at each corner. Now that we have the opposite corner secured, we can put the other two in to fully hold it in place. Now we need to attach our cable anchor bracket. We want our cable to enter the pulley at the center section, not off to the side, like so. Just in the center section like that. We want to make sure the cable leaves our hose here in a straight line. We'll take our clamp, slide it over the spot where the clamp goes into, and secure it through our floorboard with the provided self-tapping screws. Now that we have our cable secured and we have no slack in it, we need to adjust our free play so we have just enough of the ball sticking out that will give us about quarter inch of slack in our line. You'll know when enough's sticking out when it's anywhere between a half to a full ball. To do that, we take two half-inch wrenches. We'll back off the back nut, and we will loosen up the front not. We have about a half ball sticking out now. That's what we want, so we'll tighten back up the back nut, hold the front nut in place while we do it, and that'll lock it down to our pedal bracket. Once we have that snugged down, perfect. Just enough slack right there, and our bracket is securely mounted to the pedal now. Now we'll take our small air line here and we'll plug it into our cylinder where our cable comes out of. We'll just push it in all the way until it stops, pull back and make sure it's secure. Now we need to find a place to mount our cylinder. We're going to mount ours behind this console cover here, for our center console. This will give us minimal bends and give us a nice straight line to where we have our bracket mounted. There's a T30 torques bit right here. You can, honestly, use a flathead screwdriver on it. There is a slot on it. We'll remove this, and grab the panel, pull up, take our cylinder here and slide up underneath, tuck our air line on behind. With that tucked away, we can re-secure the screw. Our cylinder's actually in there nice and tight. I'm tugging on our cable here pretty hard. It's not going to move. That's ideal. We don't want to have to listen to it rattle around. Now we'll take our air line tubing here. We'll measure out how much we're going to need to connect to this port right here, which has the black push fitting on it. We'll use an air line tubing cutter here. We have these available on our website. That's part number F9009. Get that cut, and we'll stick it in the hole. We'll push it in all the way until it stops. Now we'll take our quarter inch air line here, and our quarter inch vacuum hose, we'll slide the vacuum hose onto the airline. Make sure it goes down pretty far. We have about an inch on there right now. That's plenty. Now we'll take our vacuum line here and plug it onto our remaining port on our control unit. We'll push it on all the way until it stops. Now we'll take our other end of our air line tubing, and we'll route it through an existing hole in our firewall up here. This hole was not here if your vehicle was equipped with a manual transmission. That's where your clutch master cylinder goes. In our case, since we have an automatic, we can stick our air line tubing through there without a problem. Here's our air line tubing coming out through that hole, right next to our brake booster. We'll just go ahead and pull it on up the rest of the way. Now we'll take our air line tubing here, now that we have routed it in the engine bay, and we'll just secure it to a couple existing fastening points here, so it's nice and tucked up out of the way. Now we need to go to our brake booster, which is right here. Find the vacuum hose coming off of it, and we need to separate this from the booster, so we'll disconnect this electrical connector here by pushing in on the tab, and pulling apart. Then, we'll just grab our sensor here and twist it out of our booster. Now we need to find a straight section of our vacuum line to make a cut in. I'm going to go right here. We'll just cut this. We can slide off this sleeve that's on it. Don't need it. This other one we'll just pull down for the time being so we have access to our hose. Now that we have one cut made, we'll make a second cut further on down for the insertion of our check valve. Slide this off. Now we'll take our black check valve. We want to have the red side facing towards the engine with the arrow going towards the engine, as well, and we will put this in between the cut we just made. It's a tight squeeze so you may need to assist it a little bit with a pair of pliers. Hold it in place while you work the hose on down. We have that mostly in there now. Now we'll insert the check valve into the other hose. You might be able to put a little soapy water on there to help it go in, and we'll just line the marks back up, that we had earlier. Take our T fitting, take about an inch and a half section of our quarter inch vacuum line that comes with the kit, put it on the small fitting, take the line that came off our booster, put it on one side. On the other side, we'll put back in on the hose going towards the engine. Now we'll measure off how much of our air line we're going to need to connect to our vacuum line here. Our excess cut off, we'll slide it inside the hose. That completes all of our vacuum air line tubing connections, now. Now we'll take our two electrical connectors here and plug them into the appropriate ports. Both of these are different sizes and they can only go in one way. This one here's our power and ground, and also our break away switch. This one here is our input, which will tell the unit to operate. Now we'll route all of our wires that we just plugged in through the hole in the firewall that we used earlier to get our air line tubing through. We went ahead, after we got our wires out of the firewall, we took our power and our ground wire and secured it to an existing wiring harness that goes across the firewall, brought it over to where our battery is. We'll do our connections to there later, but we just have it where we need it for right now. Our four-pull flat and our break away switch wire, we route it underneath his panel here, into the side of our washer fluid reservoir. We're going to drop these two down below, by our washer fluid reservoir. Here's our four-pull flat wire right here that we drop down, and our break away switch wire. The way it dropped down, it avoided any moving parts or sources of heat, so we're good there. Our break away switch, we previously mounted when we did our base plate, and here's our connector for that right there. We're going to work on making our connections with our four-pull flat wiring to our existing four-pull flat wiring from when we installed our towed vehicle lighting system. We have some excess cable here. We'll go ahead and trim off that excess, and then we'll separate all four of our wires. Now we're locate our wires for that, and do the same. Now we have that separated, we'll make sure we separate our ground wire, as well. Now we'll strip everything back. We'll start with the yellow wire that we dropped down. We'll twist it together with the yellow wire that leads to our lighting system in the back. Stick on a butt connector. We're using butt connectors that don't come with our kit. These are heat-shrink butt connectors. These are four 10 to 12 gauge wire. Now we'll do the same for our green wire, our white wire, and our brown wire. Just match them up color to color. Now that we tied in our braking system, we just have our ground wire and our three other wires. Just match them up color to color. We can now take a heat gun and shrink them on down to make a nice, weather tight seal. We do have these heat guns available on our website if you'd like to purchase one. We'll take our break away switch and our cable and plug those two in together. Once we have those firmly seated, we can wrap in some electrical tape. We went ahead and bundled up the rest of the slack in our break away cable here, with some zip ties. There's a channel right here in our frame that has a wiring harness inside of it already. We will zip tie that bundle to it to help keep it from moving around. Now we can go ahead and reinstall our carpet. We cut out a square right here for our pulley block to sit through, made a notch right here to wrap around our cable. Now we'll make sure we reconnect our seatbelt. Now we'll reinstall our bolts that hold our seat in place. We have one final thing to do, is to supply power to our unit, so we'll separate our red and black wires, we'll measure off how much we need for the black wire to connect to the negative terminal of our battery, remove the excess. We'll strip off our insulation here, a little bit, attach the provided ring terminal terminal, and crimp it on down. We'll remove this 10 mm nut right here, place our ring terminal under the stud, reinstall the clamp which tightens down the post, reinstall the bevel nut, measure off about an inch from where it goes from our firewall here. Cut off the excess. Strip off some insulation. Crimp that down. Take our fuse holder, cut it right in the middle, so we have two separate loops right now. We'll strip out the insulation on both ends, place a ring terminal on one end. The other end will go into our yellow butt connector. Crimp that on down. Now, just like we've done with any other butt connector that has power going through it, we'll wrap it in electrical tape. We'll remove one of the 10 mm nuts on our positive battery terminal, place a ring terminal over the stud, reinstall the nut. We have all the connections made now. Take our fuse holder, open it up, and install our provided 20 amp fuse, and we'll close our dust cover on up. All right. Now that we've wrapped things up inside of our Jeep, we've moved onto install our indicator light system inside of our RV. We're going to remove this lower dash panel here. We have two torque screws here. They are T25s. We'll go ahead and remove these. Now we'll just grab the panel and pull it on down and remove it. We're going to mount our indicator light right here in the center top edge of this panel, but if we look where we removed it from, just pull straight down, there is an obstruction in the way. It's just plastic. There's nothing behind it that we've verified is going to be an issue, so what we're going to do, drill a hole for our wires to pass through. Now we'll take our panel and a 5/16 drill bit, and drill through the location we want. Now that our hole is drilled, peel back our sticker here and we'll center it up over our hole just like that. Now we'll take our light, feed the wires on through the hole, push it through the hole, and we'll come to the back side, take our speed clip here, stick it on over and down until it locks our light in place against the panel. Now we'll take our buzzer, right here, and tie the wires in together, color by color, for our indicator light. White will go to white and red will go to red. We'll twist them together, place them inside a blue butt connector, crimp them on down. Then we'll repeat the same process for the red wire. Now that our wires have been tied together, we'll extend them with some scrap wire we have laying around. You can also purchase wire on our website if you need it, part number 16-1-1 for 16 gauge wire, that's sold by the foot. Our scrap wire is actually the leftover wires that connected our operating unit to our battery. You will have leftover wire in your kit. We'll be using a red wire for the red wire and the black wire for the white. Now we'll feed the wires through the hole that we drilled in our dash. We'll also feed our buzzer through that hole. Now, if you find out that your buzzer doesn't fit through the hole, you need to use a larger drill bit, or just notch it a little bit like I did, and it'll push through. We'll just feed the wires on through, like so, then we reinstall the panel. We have three screws right here above our door sill on our driver's side. Take these screws out. Lift that up. Our carpet here pulls up, and we have access to run our wire. We tucked our red wire behind our center console here. When we had our carpet up, we ran it underneath it. It comes out right here. Now we have two screws that hold this panel in place. We'll take these out. Grab the panel, pull it back a little bit, and we'll take our wire, feed it underneath it. We have it underneath this panel, now. Feed it down the rest of the way and there's a hole right there underneath, so we'll take this panel out and feed it through that hole. Now we have it inside this panel. We'll go behind our fuse box here, and raise it on up. The way that we're installing this indicator light, we're using it in a way so that we don't have to use the patch cord between our RV and our Jeep. The tow package in our RV never had a brake controller installed, but it is pre-wired for it. This is the wire for the output for our trailer brakes that we're using. We'll go ahead and just cut off this terminated cap, strip off some wire, stick on a butt connector. These are included with our kit. We'll crimp it on down. Now the red wire that we brought on over, we'll strip off some of the insulation from it, we'll stick that in the butt connector, then we'll crimp that guy on down. We'll just tuck these wires back inside and we'll reinstall all of our panels. Our black wire, we follow the same path as the red wire, followed it down, behind the center console, went underneath our gas pedal here, behind our carpet. We're going to ground it right here, our firewall. We'll cut off our excess wire, strip off some insulation, take our ring terminal that's provided with our kit, and crimp it down. We'll secure it to our firewall with the self-tapping screw that's provided with our kit. That completes our look at and the installation of the Roadmaster InvisiBrake Supplemental Braking System, part number RM-8700, with our 2016 Forest River on a Mercedes Benz chassis RV, and our 2017 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited.