Trailer Wiring Harness Installation - 2018 Dodge Durango
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How to Install a Trailer Wiring Harness on a 2018 Dodge Durango
Speaker 1: Today, on our 2018 Dodge Durango, we're going to be installing Tekonsha's T-One Vehicle Wiring Harness, Part Number 118617. This vehicle wiring harness is going to provide your trailer with all the necessary lighting. This includes the left turn signal, right turn signal, tail lamps, and brake lamps, so you'll be DOT compliant in all states.One of the nicest things about this harness is that is has a module that will intercept the signals at each of your left and right tail lamp assemblies. It'll see those signals and then generate its own signal and send it back here to our connector. This module has its own dedicated power circuit that is fused so if there's any faults on your trailer, the fuse will just open to our module and it won't affect any of your vehicle wiring. So you can correct your trailer's faults and then just replace the fuse and you're ready to get back on the road.There's a dust cap located on the end to help keep out any dirt and debris when you're not using it.
This will help ensure you have a long lasting connection. Additionally, it can be used to hold your harness up, out of the way, by hooking it onto one of the safety chain loops on your hitch.We'll begin our installation here at the rear of the vehicle by removing both of our driver's and passenger's side tail end assemblies. We'll start here on our driver's side. I'm going to use a flat bladed screwdriver to pop out the center of this push pin here, and then we can pop out the rest of the push pin.We'll do the same for the lower push pin, and then we can pop out our tail light assembly by pulling rearward. I like to use a plastic trim panel rivet tool to help pop it rearward.
This just makes it a little easier to get it to release from its pushed in tabs.Here on the back side, we'll disconnect our electrical connector by pressing in on the release tab there and pulling outward.We'll set our tail light assembly aside, and perform the same steps on the other side to get that tail light removed.Well now we're on our wiring up to our connector here. We're going to use a piece of airline tubing as fish wire. It's going to make it a lot easier to get your wiring up. We're going to go down through the opening here and just run it down. You can see daylight, so just follow that path until you get it to come out the bottom.We'll now take our fish wire and some electrical tape and tape our new harness to that fish wire.
This is a pretty large connector so I do recommend that you get the tape all the way around the connector so that way it can't bend over sideways and get caught on anything. Then we're just going to pull it back up.Once we've got our connector pulled up, we can disconnect our fish line and we're going to connect it to our factory connector.We can now reconnect our driver's side tail light to our new harness and reinstall your tail end assembly in reverse order how you removed it.You'll just push your pushpins back into place to reinstall those.It's a good idea now to drop your fish wire down your passenger side so you're prepared to pull that side up once we've got it routed across, so we're going to drop that down now.We're going to run our green wire connector now from our driver's side over towards our passenger's side. You want to try to get away from your exhaust as best as possible. First going to take ours up above our hitch, and just try and stay above the hitch as we go across.We'll now take the black wire that comes in our kit. We're going to strip some of it back.
I'm going to strip a little bit more back on the black wire coming off of our module, and we're going to connect the black wire to our module with the yellow butt connector. We've decided to upgrade ours from the butt connectors that come in the kit, the heat shrink butt connectors, you can pick these up at etrailer.com, and they'll keep out any moisture from causing any damage and corrosion from occurring.We'll then shrink down our butt connector with a heat gun.Next we'll connect our ground wire using the self tapping screw that comes in the kit with a 1/4" socket. We're just going to feed it up through here above our exhaust. We're going to run it into the frame right here.We're now going to mount our module. It's a good idea to use some alcohol on a rag to clean the area where you're going to stick it to to make sure you have good adhesion. This just cleans off all the debris. All right.We'll then peel one side of the backing off of our adhesive pad. We're going to stick it to the back side of our module. We'll then take the backing off the other side of our module. Then we're going to stick it on the frame right where we just cleaned off.We're then going to route our four pole connector wire over towards our hitch here. Then we can use our dust cap to secure it to the safety chain loop.We'll take our green wire that we routed across now. We're going to tape it to our fish wire that we ran down, and we can then pull our wire up. We'll then remove it from our fish wire, connect it to our factory harness here. We'll use one of the zip ties that comes in out kit. We're going to zip tie up this excess green wire here. This way we don't have to worry about it dropping down and coming into contact with our exhaust or any of that shenanigans.We'll now plug our new harness into our tail light assembly and reinstall our tail light assembly just like we did on the other side.In preparation for wiring our wiring up to orange compartment, we're going to run our fish wire down again. For on our passenger side we're going to route it down this opening here because there is a factory wiring harness that runs down. We're gonna follow it through this opening.We'll now need to route our black wire up to the front of our vehicle so we can get into orange compartment. I'm going to route that wire now, and I'll show you the path I took to get it there.We started by running our wire across our hitch onto this side of our spare tire. We then came forward and we went up over top of the heat shield here for our tire. Going up above our fuel lines, above our suspension components until we hit our factory wiring here. Here we just followed that factory wiring all the way up because when you're routing your wire you want to make sure that you don't come into contact with any moving objects such as your steering and suspension or anything excessively hot such as your exhaust. So we follow this factory wiring, we know that it's going to be routed in a safe manner that's away from all those dangerous components.We just follow it on up right to here, and this is where we drop down our fish wire from before, but we're just going to go ahead and connect that to it with some electrical tape here. I do recommend when you're putting wire on to a fish wire with electrical tape that you go all the way up, even slightly above the wire to give it a smooth transition so the wire doesn't get caught on anything.Now we'll pull that wiring up, and it's always a good idea to double check back down below to make sure that your wiring didn't get caught on anything, that you've got it all the way pulled up.We'll take our wiring here. We're going to push it through this little foamy spot right there, and that will bring it right to where we're going to be making our connection here at our fusebox. Press both these heads and you can open that on up, and that's the nut we're going to need to remove to connect our harness.We're going to prepare our harness real quick before we do that, so you'll cut your harness in half. We're going to strip back both ends of our harness. On one side we're going to connect a yellow ring terminal. This comes with your kit, and on the other side you're going to connect a yellow butt connector. Once again, we're upgrading ours, that heat shrink butt connector, to keep out any moisture, and we're now going to connect it to our fusebox.We'll now remove this nut with a 13 millimeter socket. We'll set our ring terminal on the post, and then we're just going to reinstall that nut.We'll now take our black wire. We're going to trim it to length. You don't need all this. Strip it back, and crimp it on to the other end of our butt connector here for our fuse harness. We'll shrink it down with our heat gun.We can now install our fuse into our fuse harness, and then test our system out.You can now connect your four pole connector here to either your trailer or a tester. We're going to plug it into our tester here. You can pick up one of these testers here at etrailer.com.Now we'll verify our signals by testing our left turn, our right turn, tail lamps and brake lamps, and with everything working properly we're ready to hit the road.That completes our installation of Tekonsha's T-One Vehicle Wiring Harness on our 2018 Dodge Durango.
Info for this part was:
Video by:
Andrew K
Video by:
Zach D
Video by:
Jonathan Y
Video by:
Schuyler H
Video Edited:
Joshua S
Video Edited:
Jacob T
Video Edited:
Andrew L
Video Edited:
Chris R
Test Fit:
Nicholas E
Test Fit:
Shane H
Test Fit:
David F
Test Fit:
Ryan G
Test Fit:
Clayton O
Installed by:
Cole B
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Xavier R.
12/27/2020
Need a wiring harness for a Dodge Durango 2018, how much, how soon can I get it? Thanks.