SMI Air Force One Braking System Installation - 2017 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited

Products Featured in this Video

Demco Air Force One Supplemental Braking System for Motorhomes with Air Brakes - Proportional

311 reviews

Code: SM99243

Retail: $1,840.71

Price:  $1,329.00

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

• Fixed System
• Power Assist Brake Compatible
• Air Brakes
• Demco

This truly proportional braking system uses the air pressure from your RV's brakes to apply the brakes in your towed car in the same manner. Low-profile design installs out of your way and is always at the ready.

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How to Install the SMI Air Force One Braking System on a 2017 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited

Today in our 2017 Jeep Wrangler unlimited, which we're going to be connected to our American Eagle Motor Home on the Spartan chassis, we're going to be showing you how to install the SMI Air Force One proportional supplemental breaking system for motor homes with air brakes. Part number SM99243. Now, a huge advantage to the Air Force One braking system isn't only in how well it works, but how easy it is to connect. We don't have to worry about putting anything in the vehicle. Everything's already in the jeep, it's already on the coach. All we have to do is hook up our airline and our breakaway switch. We've got our easy-to-reach connector here on the back.

We're going to take off that protective cover, that's going to keep that free of any dirt or debris. Plug in there. Then also on the front of our jeep, which also has the provide cover. The breakaway switch cable's also provided, we're going to have two carabineers to connect on each end. You do want to ensure that you connect this to your hitch or your frame, to your safety chains.

Now, to test out the system initially, we'll have somebody in the coach press the brake down about 25% percent. We should see the same response in our Jeep. We'll then go to about 50%, and then 100%. We'll do this a couple time. That'll charge the system, and it'll be ready for use.

The next step will be testing out our breakaway. To test out the breakaway switch, once the system's charged, we're just going to pull. We're going to hear the activation, we'll see the red LEDs come on. To begin our installation, we're going to get a few of our key components mounted. We're going to start on the outside of the vehicle, and we'll work our way in. The first thing we're going to mount is our operating unit.

This is something that needs to be out of the way of road spray, water, things like that. This can go underneath the hood, but it's a pretty tight fit up there with this particular model so we're going to be using the cross brakes, it's right up underneath the air dam here. That's going to run across right here. This is our existing wiring for our towed vehicle harness. It's nice solid brace right here, it's going to be a great spot. We've got a couple of push-pin fasteners. If you pull these out, you see how that comes down a little bit It's going to give you more room to work. One on each side, just pull that middle out, and then the whole thing will come out. Now, to get it mounted in position, we're going to use two metal loom clamps. This is part number A0250. We've got one on each side. It's going to go around that bar that comes off of the box. We're going to use a couple of number 12 self-tapping screws. You'll have to provide these just like the loom clamps. Got that one taken care of, we'll do the same thing on this side. That's going to give us a really nice secure mount. We raise our air dam back up, that'll keep it nice and protected. Won't have to worry about any issues. One key thing to remember when mounting is to never block or cover up this discharge hole, or this exhaust hole. By blocking that you could cause the operating unit not to function properly. Now we're going to move on to getting our breakaway switch mounted. This needs to be mounted up on the front of the vehicle. You've got options as to how you want to do that. What we like to do, we just took one of our universal short brackets, this is part number 18140, and I've cut about an inch and 7/8 off that and I've drilled a hole, you'll want to use a hole that's the size that it'll accommodate the bolt that came with your breakaway. This is going to sit right up on top just like that, and we've got our clamp that comes around. That's going to hold that in place for us. Just feed that in that worm drive clamp, or that worm gear clamp, around. Then you tip the bolt down, that's kind of going to lock that position for us. Now with the 5/16th inch socket bit driver, we'll get that tightened up. Trim off our excess. Now, we've matched our breakaway switch just a little bit here, that's going to accommodate for when that clamp goes around our bracket. Place the provided bolt through, and we're going to bring that down through just like that. Place our nylon lock there on the bottom. A couple of 11 millimeters will help us get this tightened up, offer us a nice secure connection. I'm going to use just a little bit of electrical tape, and I'm going to tape over the orange and blue wire where it's going to be outside of our inaudible 00:04:51. Just going to help with appearances, make sure it looks nice. Now, you'll either pass these through the existing hole, if you had to drill that out for your base plate, or you can go right in between the edge between the air dam and that piece of metal right there, you can kind of go up and over there. Our base plate asked us to drill a whole, which is nice, because now we can use it for our airline and for our wiring here on the breakaway. Now, for our air fitting, we've used another short bracket, just drilled two holes wide enough to accommodate that, so it'll slide right down on there. We use the provided hardware to secure it, which again is going to be bolts with nylon lock nuts. Now we'll use our clamp just like before, and bring that around and get it secured off. Now we're going to take a piece of our airline tubing and we're going to run it . again, you have to choose whether your braking system had an area where you could run through the opening, or just through that little crack up there between the metal and the air dam. You're going to bring it back to your operating unit. Now, we want to ensure that we have a nice, flush cut, using an airline tubing cutter, part number F90009, and then since this is going to be connected to the front of the vehicle, it needs to go in the air in port. You push that in, you're going to feel one click, and then you should feel a second click, and then you should be able to pull on it without it moving. Now another flush cut here on the outside, and we can slide that right into our 90% push-to-connect fitting right there, just like that. Now that we've got the breakaway switch mounted, we can bring our wires inside of here. We're going to be connecting the blue one with one of our black wires. Now, to make our connection, we're going to be using part number DW05744. It's going to be a heat shrink butt connector. It's just going to give superior corrosion resistance, since we are going to have this on the outside of the vehicle. So we're going to get that wire stripped back, and also one of the wires coming out of our operating unit. It doesn't matter which one. Get a good connection now, we can just use a type of heat source. Whether you want to use a lighter, a mini torch, or a heat gun, we'll shrink that down. The goal is not to overheat it. Just a little bit at a time, and you'll see it shrink down around the wire. The wire will look like it's magnified a little bit. We'll also have a little bit of that clear gel like that that comes out of the end. That's going to give us great protection from the elements, we'll never have to worry about corrosion here with this connection. Now for the other black wire that comes out of our operating unit, we're going to bring it over here and ground it right to the metal. Just cut off what we need, strip it back. We can add on the provided ring terminal. We'll use the provided self-tapping screw and the 5/16ths inch bit driver to get our whole started. We can place our ring terminal on there, and secure it down. Now, the last wire we'll have down here to connect is going to be our orange and our black. We need to run this up to our battery. It's going to be a little bit short for that application, so we're going to add on about six feet of regular twelve gauge wire. We sell it on our website, part number is 12-1-1. To connect them, another heat shrink butt connector. This one's larger, though, this is DW05745. Just strip these back and splice them together. Just like before, we can get this shrank down. Now let's bring our wire over our sway bar here. I want to start zip tying it off to this wire loop. That'll keep it up out of the way of our sway bar, we won't have to worry about any rubbing. I'm going to bring my wiring straight up. We're going to go underneath the air box. You can see there's a hose right here, and also one right here. We can run right along the bottom of that hose, and that'll get us pretty close to the battery location that we're looking for. Now we're going to use a coat hanger, I'm just going to use an aluminum magnet here. I'm going to go down, hook around the wire, and we can pull it right on up here. Now we're here at the driver's side underneath our hood. We're going to be running our air line, this is going to go from inside the at the actuator down to our operating unit. Right beside the break booster there's a small grommet there in the firewall. That's what we're going to use to pass through. I like to route my airline from about this point down. I'm going to bring it right along this back edge, see it located right down there, about midway down the brake booster. I'm gonna bring it behind this panel, and also this one around the corner. We're going to drop down right here in front of our washer fluid tank. Now, we should have a pretty straight shot here behind the horn, which would be right here, to get right down there where we've got our operating unit mounted. Now, we're also going to route our vacuum line down. This is going to go from our operating unit to a tee we'll be mounting here on a vacuum line from the brake booster. This one I'm going to go through the gap here between the engine coolant tank and our washer fluid tank. There's going to be a gap right here. We're going to zip tie it off to this line, that way it'll give us a pretty straight shot. Now let's get everything zip tied off to kind of keep it neat down here. This sway bar does kind of move a little bit, so we don't want anything to be laying down here rubbing on it, so keep it up off there. This'll be connected to our air out. That's going to be the air going out the actuator on our brake pedal. Use our tubing cutter again, make it nice and flush. Just like the air inside, you want to feel those two little clicks. Now, inline on our vacuum hose before we get to the operating unit, we need to put in a check valve. It's a pretty simple process, just cut this off nice and flush. On this side, we're going to put that white side. We want the black side of the check valve to face towards the operating unit. Bring that over. Trim off a little excess if we need to. It's going to slide on the vacuum port. All right. A couple zip ties here help keep everything tidy and keep it from moving around too much. That'll pretty much take care of our connections on the bottom side of the vehicle here, so we're going to get our push-pin fasteners put back in to secure our air dam, and we'll head up top and get to work. Now we're going to bring our vacuum line up. Get some zip ties put on it here. Just going to run it right along this hose, right underneath the smaller vacuum hose. Then right up here, and that'll give us a really nice factory look when it's all said and done. This is the vacuum line we're going to be teeing into. What we'll need to do is remove this kind of sheeting that goes over it here. It's usually easier to kind of compress it down and try to cut it all at once. Best way's usually with scissors. We're going to make a couple cuts. One's going to be right here, we're going to place our tee in there. The other one will be right here where we'll place our check valve. Start with this one. We'll get our check valve slit in there. Also we'll get our tee slid down in there. This slid right back in the spot where we just removed it from. Little bit of moisture on there is a good idea, just to help us get it slid together. Now, you want the orientation of the check valve to be just like this. We should have our brake booster vacuum line coming out to the tee, going down to the white side on the check valve, which will have the black side of the check valve closest to the vehicle's engine. We'll figure out how much of our vacuum line we need, we can cut off the rest and get that slid on our tee. Connection's done. Now it'll be time to pass our airline through that grommet and into the passenger compartment of the vehicle. You have a lot of airline tubing left over, you're not going to need it all. What we're going to do is set off seven or eight feet, give us plenty once we get in there. We'll have to trim it again I'm sure, but let's get it trimmed off here and show you where that grommet is again. Located right underneath these washer fluid hoses, just to the right side of the brake booster on the driver's side. We'll just feed quite a bit through there. It's pretty open underneath the dashboard, so it should be pretty easy to find. Right up here in the firewall is where our air line came through. Now we're going to get this tucked up and out of the way, take care of the rest of mounting our actuator and our light. We can plug that in once we have everything else installed. Now on the actuator itself you want to pull the four nuts off of here, and that's holding on our plate. That'll allow us to remove our plate and set that aside. We're also going to take care of installing our reed switch. Now, the reed switch is designed to slide in the slot that we have here on our actuator. Now, this should be factory positioned. If our light doesn't give us the signals we need, we can move this clamp in and out slightly to adjust that, but usually they're set pretty well. Slide that in just like that. We've got that set screw right here, you're going to need a little flat blade screwdriver to get that secure. Now we'll mock up the actuator. We want this to be positioned so when the brake pedal's fully depressed, it's pretty much level. You have to watch this front edge, there's a small plug here, and we don't want it to make contact with that. We don't want to have any interference with that. Really just go just above it there. Now, once we find that position, we need to bring our wire back to the firewall, we need to see where that location is. You see we've marked this spot here in the firewall where we're going to be putting our screw. We're going to use the self-tapping screw that's provided. Let's get our hole started now. Once we've got our hole started, let's hold our actuator unit up here in place and see exactly how much length we need in our cable here. We want to have a little bit of slack. That looks pretty good right there. Once we have that link determined, see that cable's doubled up through there, we're going to use a 5/32nd Allen piece. We want to go down 'til that makes contact, and then we're going to go about 1/18th of a turn. We don't want to overdue it because that can damage our wiring there. Then we'll slide our plate back on and get those four nuts put back on. Once we have the actuator mocked up on the pedal, we can bring our block back to the hole that we created. It looks a little bit short inaudible 00:17:43. Get that secured. Looks like we've got a good amount of slack, and we've also got clearance. You see here, we've got the clearance we need between this black piece here and our elbow, we won't have any interference there. We want about 1/4 inch of play, an 1/8th to a 1/4 inch of play in our cable there. Get those set, we can start tightening our nuts down here in a crossing pattern. Now, the plate's designed to flex around the pedal, that's how it gets a good hold on there. That's nice secure. Still have that little bit of slack that we want. Now we're going to trim out just a little bit of the carpet there, just so it clears that wire. We don't need anything going up and touching it. The little bit of extra we have here, that can get tucked in behind the carpeting there. Looking good. Now it's time for us to mount our notification light. This light's designed with three red LEDs to indicate when the system is activated. This needs to be somewhere where you can see it pretty easily from the back of your coach, from your monitoring camera. Typically, I like to go up here on the back of the mirror. Tends to keep it in a very visible location. You don't want to block any of your sensors, you see a sensor right there, we don't need to block that. Just clean that off with some rubbing alcohol. Get some double stick here, we're going to pull the red portion of that off. Bring that up into position. We'll get that leveled out, and push firmly all the way across so it really sticks on the back of our mirror really well. We'll turn it. You'll notice there's a cable coming out of the mirror. This has the auto dimming mirror. I'm going to go right along with that. I'm going to throw another zip tie on it right where that goes into our upper section here, that cover. That'll help keep it in place. Put it all the way across here. Bring that down and around. You're going to feel a little depression here on this, it's like a rubber mold. You'll get a little opening there. That's where we'll feed our two wire ends through. You'll be able to get your hand in there, and you kind of push it in and back this way a little bit. You should be able to get it underneath our dashboard there. Now, if we grab the bottom edge of the side panel, we'll be able to get our tool in there, just kind of pop that out. That'll allow you to see where that wire's coming down. We'll bring that wire right in between the outside of the vehicle and this aluminum we have, then we'll pull down our slack. Get our panel put back in position here. Now, the two wires from our light get connected to two of the wires from our reed switch. The red wire from the light gets connected to the black wire from the switch. We can use our provided butt connectors, and those are just going to slide onto the end of those metal studs. Red to black. Then black's going to be connected to blue. We'll connect those in the same fashion. Now we're going to grab the brown wire that's included with the braking system. It's going to be connected to the brown wire coming from our reed switch. This we run out, and we're going to connect that to the battery along with the orange black wire from the breakaway. We're going to send this out of the same hole that we brought our airline tubing in. Now, the grommet is pretty flexible, you should be able to just push that through there. Just get enough though so you can find it on the outside. Pull all that slack through. We're going to need most of this wire to get over there and make our connection, so with that through we'll just let that rest right there. Take our slack here, we're going to get this tidied up, zip tied up, and out of the way. We'll use our tubing cutter to trim off our excess tube, and slide it in to our elbow. All right, hope that's in there nice and solid. Rotate that up just a bit. Another zip tie and we should have everything nice and clean. Now for our last connection underneath the dashboard we're going to ground the black wire here, right over to one of our studs that we've got right here. We're going to need to trim that, we'll show you how to make a splice here. Put that side strip back. We're going to strip this back quite a bit. We're going to have to double this up for it to work with our but connector. We're going to use a red-yellow butt connector. We'll slide that on, and we'll get that crimped down. That's connected properly, and we'll strip back the other side here as well. Then we'll strip back the black wire as part of the red and black wires coiled together in our kit. Take our small black wire, and we'll twist it right around there. That goes in the other side of our butt connector. Now, we don't need too much length, maybe about six inches here. Trim that black wire off. Strip the end there, and we'll add on the provided blue ring terminal. That we can connect between one of the two ground studs right here. You need a 10 millimeter socket to remove the nut. Place the ring terminal on and secure the nut. All right. All of our connections are going to be made here. Now it's time to just take a few zip ties and we can secure this up out of the way. Now, for our ground wire, we're just going to bring that up, kind of run it behind this wire loom to hide it. Use some zip ties to secure it and head over towards our battery. Now, the orange and black wire that we had before, remember we extended it with our black wires here. We're going to run that right up in this area, just like our brown wire. We're going to trim both of those off close to our positive battery terminal. We'll get them stripped back. Now we're going to twist the two of those together and add on another one of our yellow heat shrink butt connectors. It's going to be the same part number that we had before. Two wires going into one this time. To the other side, we're going to add our fuse hole. We'll trim that off at about the 4:00 position or so, strip both ends back. The longer side we cut will go into the butt connector. Shorter side, we're going to add a ring terminal to it. Now, the ring terminal that came with our kit isn't quite large enough for our studs, so we're going to use one a little bit larger. This'll have a 3/8ths diameter hole. Get that crimped on there. You see no fuse in the fuse holder when we make our connection. We'll get our butt connector shrank down, get everything connected. Need a 10 millimeter socket to remove the nut that's on the stud. I like to place my ring terminal underneath anything that's existing there. Replace the nut and tighten it back down. Now we'll add in our provided 10 amp fuse, and then bring our cover down over it to protect it. That we can just tuck down there out of the way, that way we can easily get to it if we need to, but it'll be out of the way if we don't. Now we've got our Jeep taken care of, we're going to move on to the RV here. We've got our coach tank assembly. We need to get this installed. You'll see there's a bracket that has four holes here. Those four holes you'll use two of those, one on each side, and you're going to mount this either to maybe the frame of the chassis if you decide you want to drill through that. I like to find storage boxes like this when I can. Typically they're open behind them, which will allow you to get in there and put your washers and your nuts on. The real important thing to remember when you're mounting it is that the valve here on the bottom, we want that to face down or to the sides. We don't want those facing up. Got a good hand's width of clearance around everything, kind of get our lines where we want it. We're going to mark two of our hole locations. Now, with those locations marked, we're going to drill a 3/8ths hole. You certainly want to ensure that there's nothing behind there that you're going to be drilling into. Now we'll bring our bolts through our bracket. You'll get them lined up with your holes here and slide them through. Now it's a good idea to have somebody hold this in place while you head out and get the washers and nuts put on the other side. Now I'm going to place on a larger washer, this is like a 5/8ths washer. I'm going to place on the washer that was provided. I like to use a little bit larger washer just to kind of spread out the force pulling out on our box there. We're going to thread on our lock nut. Do the same thing for the other one. We'll use our 9/16ths socket wrench to tighten that down, and again, you're probably going to need somebody inside there to kind of hold everything from moving around. We'll just run these down so they're snug. Great. We should be in good shape. We've got our tank securely mounted underneath the coach here. This is going to be the line or the port that we need to run back to the back of the motor home. We'll bring in our quarter inch airline again. Get a nice flush cut on that. You'll see the insert inside of our push-to-connect fitting, that needs to go inside of the air line. We'll slide it into the stopping point and then give it a firm press, and it'll get firmly seated. You should now be able to pull on it without it coming out. We're going to make a slight bend in that. We don't want to bend it too much, we don't want to kink it, but bend it over enough to start running toward the back of the coach. The biggest thing you want to avoid are going to be sharp edges, any real significant sources of heat, or anything else that might cause damage to our air line. Now we're going to be mounting the fitting on the rear of the coach here. Typically you're just going to mount to something like this, especially when you've got a full-length rock guard or mud flap here on the back. If your hinge is exposed you can use a bracket. If not, we'll go right up here with it. Just use our supplied hardware. Now we need to mark the holes in the bracket, you see there are two there. Get it positioned how you like it, get those holes marked. Then we're going to use a 1/4 inch drill bit and get that drilled out. Now we'll take our bolts with flash washers, bring those down through the holes we've created. We're going to have one of the flat washers behind each of those bolts, and that's going to spread out that energy across that fiberglass a little bit. Bring our bracket up on, and we'll secure it with our two nylon lock nuts. Now we can use the 7/16ths inch socket wrench, we'll get these tightened down. Now we'll bring our air line up. We just want to measure off what we need, trim it, and we'll push it into our fitting. Now, here are our air fittings that we're going to be building. You can see this is a tee block, and we've got three different sized push-to-connect fittings that we're going to be putting in. Now the smaller 1/4 inch on our Spartan chassis here are going to go in the top. You might have to change the configuration of these, but the important thing is you're going to have three inputs, two coming from our coach, and then one that's going to go out to the metered and supply air line. Once we have those quarters started, we'll move on to the 3/8ths. These will both be installed in opposite ends of one of our tee block. Then the two 5/8ths are going to go in the other one. Now, for the 1/4 inch and 3/8ths fittings, we need an 11/16ths wrench. For the larger one, we need a 15/16ths, and we just want to run them down, get plenty of that red locker down inside of the block. Now, the tee block with the larger fittings is going to be for the supply line. This is going to have the 1/4 inch airline that runs into the end of the tank in our coach assembly. On this Spartan chassis, we're going to be using this larger line right here. You'll want to use a good sharp pair of snips to cut that, and when you do, even after you try to empty the system by pumping your brakes, which we highly recommend, you still want to use a little bit of caution when you cut it because there might be a little bit of air still inside. Give that a second to vent off, then we'll cut it all the way through. It's a good idea to take of about 3/4 of an inch or so of that line. That'll give room for our tee fitting. We're going to slide this on just like any other push to connect fittings. Rotate it kind of towards the back. Now, the metered air line is going to be the smaller tee fitting, that's going to be this one here. Let's pull this loom back off of it. That'll be our metered air connection. This is going to go to the push to connect fitting between the valve and the tank on our coach assembly. We're going to start running our air line back towards our coach assembly. Just want to avoid all the things we talked about before that might damage our air line. We got our supply line connected here, remember that's the larger hose we hooked in. It's just going to put in. We're going to bring our other one right down there and them I'm going to zip tie them both off right there to keep them up and secure. Now we're going to metered air line the same way. Now we'll just pressurize the RV's system, get our tanks up to the appropriate pressure, and we'll spray all of our fittings down with a little bit of soap water just to ensure we've got a good seal. Basically, after you spray these down, let it sit for five or ten minutes, come back, and you want to look for any air bubbles that might be forming. Now, with no leaks detected, that's going to complete the installation in the SMI Air Force One, part number SM99243, on both our 2017 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, and our American Eagle Motor Home on the Spartan chassis.