Replacement Switch for Curt Soft Trac I and II Trailer Breakaway Kits

Video Transcript for Curt Trailer Breakaway Kit Switch Review

Hi there trailer owners. Today we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install Curt's replacement breakaway switch. Curt's replacement breakaway switch is designed to be a direct replacement for their breakaway kits, the Soft-Trac 1 and soft-Trac 2. So if you do have any issues with your breakaway switch you can get a new one here and get that replaced. The breakaway switch is kind of the failure point that you expect in a lot of these systems. 'Cause it just sits out here.

It gets beat on with a lot of rain and stuff and it's not uncommon that the contacts in here, over several years, just don't function like they used to. So it's always good to check your system before you go for a trip just to make sure everything's working properly. And you can do that by just pulling the pin and while you're hooked up just see if you take off, if it feels like you're dragging your trailer behind you, just go, you know, just a foot and you can verify that that's working. Now, if your switch doesn't work then you can get that replaced. It's important.

So that way, if you do have that catastrophic disconnect it will apply the brakes to help your trailer come to a safe stop and minimize any damage that occurs. Now, while this is designed as the replacement for the Soft-Trac 1 and 2 breakaway kits this will work just as a standalone part. You can install this on any trailer in any application where you'd be normally installing a breakaway switch. It's got your, just your normal in and out wire where one is hooked to power and the other one's looked to your brake system with an normally open contact on the inside and the event you have that catastrophic disconnect and the pin pulls the contacts now close which will allow your battery to flow through and directly power the brakes and engage them. And it will stay engaged until you reinsert the pin or your battery runs dead.

So we go ahead and put the pin back in there. And there's a little warning on here and it's it's just pretty important to point out that you should not use your breakaway switch here as a parking brake. If you pull the pin, obviously it's gonna apply the brakes but the brakes are being applied due to the magnet which is getting power from your battery. And that's not going to last forever. Your battery will discharge if it's sitting there with this pin pulled and if you're expecting this to hold your trailer for a specific amount of time, it may not hold that long depending on your battery.

So you don't wanna rely on that. It's not what it's for and you're putting a lot of extra stress on that magnet back there. 'Cause if you got it sittin' there and runnin' it's gonna build heat and you could cause premature wear on those components from doing that. So just don't do that. It's for emergencies only, or for testing purposes. I like to use it for that as well. Just pullin' the pin, verifying things are working but then put that back in there. It's not a parking break. So now we've talked about some of the features here of our switch, let's get into how to get it installed. We'll begin our installation here at the front of the trailer. Now this trailer here is my personal trailer. We just got done adding brakes to it. There we're no brakes existing on this trailer before. So after we got done installing the brakes we test them out, we know they all work. To ensure that I'm safe as possible I'm gonna install a breakaway switch on here as well. This one here from Curt is a, just a traditional breakaway switch. It's what you would expect as far as size and shape. I prefer the traditional styles. There are some other brands like Hopkins and stuff that make 'em smaller, a little bit more compact but me personally, you know, why change something that's worked so good for so long Curt's design here has just been solid for years. So this is the kind that I would prefer to just have on mine. It is a little bit bigger than some of the other brands but it's, it's just your traditional style. You do get plenty of length of wire there for your pull on your cable. I'd say we got pretty close to about four foot of wire there. So that'll be plenty of length to be able to mount this in a lot of different places on your trailer and still reach your hitch to be able to hook it up. We had a ground wire that was previously installed there. So we're just gonna use that. We've moved the ground further back. So we'll reuse that hole. And we do also get plenty of wire here as well. And this is really nice for other applications besides just this trailer here, like my junction box that we're gonna hook our breakaway switch to is just right here on the other side of the frame. So we only need probably, you know, a foot or less of wire to be able to make the run. But if you're installing this on like a gooseneck or fifth wheel trailer having this extra line really does come in handy to be able to reach your junction box location on those type of trailers. So this is great for not just your bumper pulls, but pretty much anything that's gonna need a breakaway switch. This is gonna be a great breakaway switch option. So both of our wires here, they are blue. And that's because it really doesn't matter which wire is hooked where as far as polarity, as long as one of these wires is hooked to power, and the other one is hooked into the power delivery to our brakes, when this pin pulls, it's gonna activate it. So it doesn't matter as far as wire color. So as long as you got it hooked up properly. So before we hook it up, we are gonna mount it on the trailer. I prefer to mount it first or at least hold it where I wanna mount it and verify that my wire length is gonna be long enough. I know it's gonna be long enough here. So we're gonna mount it. You do not get mounting hardware included with the breakaway switch. You will have to provide that yourself. We're just gonna use a self-tapping bolt here. I am gonna put a little fender washer on it there to just increase the surface area on the switch and we're gonna reuse this existing hole. So it'll run in nice and easy. It was a self Tapper that was in that place before. So we're just gonna run this down, but if you weren't using an existing hole, the self tapping screw would, would make its own hole there for you. And as I tighten this down, I want to see fairly snug but I do want to keep just a hair movement in it and that's also why I put that washer in there 'Cause if you notice here with our switch installed, there's our bolt, is if I turn it you see the switch and the washer rotate but the bolt does not. And that's kind of what we're looking for that way I know if this does rotate my bolt's not gonna back out of there. And what this also does for me is in the event of a catastrophic disconnect, our tether here that's hooked to our vehicle really needs to pull in a straight line to properly pull the pin from our switch. If we disconnect and maybe it was on a turn or the trailer the tires hit a pothole or something and it caused it to veer in one direction right at the moment of that disconnect. And it pulls at an angle like this to the side. If your switch is solid in this position and it's pulling at an angle it's just gonna rip that cable right off the plastic there on the tip, and it's not gonna pull the pin. So by leaving it a little loose that'll allow it to be able to rotate and get that straight pin pull even if it's pulling from a strange angle. So that's real important to help ensure that this is going to operate under, you know even the worst of conditions. So now we've got that mounted up there. We can go ahead and start wiring it up. I'll be feeding that probably down with my cables and stuff there but let's go ahead and turn our attention here to wiring. So one of them again has to hook to your battery power. Our battery's located here. My battery is hooked into the junction box. So we're gonna be hooking everything in the junction box to keep things nice and clean. But if you didn't have a junction box one of these would need to go over to your battery. And I would recommend putting a fuse in line. So to give you proper circuit protection. And I've already got a fuse in line from my battery going to the junction box here and we've got a 30 amp fuse in there to allow it to do what it needs to do. The other wire is just gonna hook into the brake wire. That's going to your brakes. Again I have that inside my junction box. If you don't have a junction box and you're just gonna be wired into your seven way typically the brake output wire from your brake controller in your seven way is gonna be a blue wire. That's probably why Curt made 'em blue because your brake wire is typically gonna be the blue wire but you could test that with a test light, have the assistant or something activate the brake controller while you're hooked up to your truck, just the manual slide and verify which one of those wires becomes live when the brake controllers activated to determine it. But again, blue is the most common color. Well let's head in here and open up this junction box and get it hooked up. So this is my junction box. You can buy these here at etrailer and I highly recommend them for any trailer. I've got also a small popup camper and I put one of these on there as well. It just really helps out a lot for organizing your wiring, keeping things straight. It's great for testing if you have any faults. You can come to this point for a test point. And if you're adding any accessories, this is also a great place to be able to add those accessories and access the various outputs of your inputs and outputs from your seven way. So we're going to open up our cover here so we can have access to this so we can add our components to it. This case also keeps all of our connections dry. If you we're doing this, just adding a wire into wiring, I would recommend using heat shrink butt connectors to seal 'em up. But with our cover here this keeps everything nice and sealed. So that way we can make our connections in here and have everything secure without having to use butt connectors. We are gonna be using ring terminals though and you can get those here at etrailer, to add our components. So the first thing we're gonna do is get our wires run into the box. I'm gonna go into this opening over here. So I'm gonna pull the rubber piece out of the way there. This little cap there is, your wire relief holds it secure for you. So that way, if anything, tugs the wire, it's not tugging on the connection point here. So you wanna loosen these up so you can slide your wires in if you have a junction box. After we loosen these, we can pull this out some and our wires will feed in there behind it and then we can clamp 'em back down. So we'll take our wiring here, gonna push it in place there. Into our box. There we go, get 'em both pulled in. And I always like to leave a little bit of excess on the outside of the box here. So you can see, I got a little bit back in there. I like to do that for future repairs and stuff. We'll probably end up using a cable tie to secure some of that there, but I always like to have just a little bit of excess. So we'll leave that to about there. Now one of our wires is gonna connect to the blue wire which is our brake output, and that's here. And if you look here in the junction box all the studs do have colors on 'em to help make things a little bit easier for you for when you're identifying things, hooking 'em up. So we know one's gonna go to the blue wire here for our brake output from the brake controller and the other one needs to go to our battery power which is gonna be over here. This black stud, most commonly that's gonna be a black wire. It just depends on your seven way though. My particular seven way, or it's a red wire for the power output and the battery connection but it's gonna go to the black stud here. So that's where our other one's gonna go to get our battery power. So I'm gonna trim 'em to length now. So this guy we know we want to go pretty much just to there. And again, doesn't matter which one's which as long as they're both hooked up to these two places. And then this one will go over to here. Trim off the excess we don't need. We'll now strip these back and if you we're doing just a bare wire connection you would want to cut whatever circuit you want to tap into and strip those ends back. So you can add a heat shrink butt connector in there. And again, you can buy those here at etrailer, but for us since we have the junction box, we're gonna be using ring terminals to make our connections to the posts. So after stripping 'em I like to twist the wires a little bit, just helps the ends slide into our ring terminals more easily. So we'll take our ring terminals here and crimp it onto our wire. We're just sliding the wire into the ring terminal. And we can usually see the other side that the wire slides through just a little bit. Crimp it down. We'll repeat that for the other one here, for that one. Slide it on our wire there and crimp it down. All right, so now we'll make our connections here. I'm gonna start with this one, 'cause this is the breakaway switch output. So I'm gonna start with that one just 'cause we don't have any truck or anything hooked up so there's no way this one's gonna be live. So we're using a eight millimeter or a 5/16s socket. Either one will work to remove the nut. Behind the nut there is a small washer on here so we wanna make sure we pull that washer off. And it can be a little difficult, you might wanna use a screwdriver or something to help slide that washer off. I've got a spare ring terminal here I'm gonna use. Now these ring terminals that I put on there those don't come included in your kit. We did have to get those separately and you can get those here at etrailer. After our washer slid off of there, we'll take our wire here and we're just gonna push it into place. Slide it over the stud. Reinstall the washer and the nut. All right, and now we'll do our battery positive. Now this one over here, this wire is hooked directly to the battery so this is gonna be live. So what you may wanna do is disconnect the negative cable on your battery. And that way, you know, you won't have any live wires here and you could also be, I'm gonna be careful. And I know that if I just disconnect this and don't let any of those wires come off of there, I should be fine. But our ground stud is right here next to it. So you do want to be careful. So if you're doing this at home, I do recommend that you disconnect the negative battery cable. So that way you do not have to worry about any potential shorts. So just like our other one if we remove the nut, that is going to be a washer slid on there so we need to get that popped off of there. So we get our washer slid off and then here we go, our washer is now slid off of there. So now we'll take our other wire from our breakaway switch, slide that over the stud and then we can place our washer and nut back in place and tighten those down. All right, we've got our connections made in here. So now we'll just clean this up. Tighten down our cable relief. Okay, and then you can reinstall your cover. And before reinstalling the cover, I do recommend that you test out your system and make sure it's working. I got a lot of confidence that it's gonna work here. So we're gonna put this back on. Just keep that in mind. We'll be testing it here in just a second 'cause we are all hooked up. I did Jack up one side of the trailer so that way we can spin a wheel. So it'll be able to verify our breakaway switches operation. So now we've got an assistant at the front who's gonna pull the breakaway switch pin. I've got just this side of the trailer jacked up. Wheels are chalked on the other side. Here we can see it spins and then when we pull the pin, our wheel stops immediately. We are now locked up. Looks like we are on this wheel as well. It's not a bad idea to now check the other side 'cause that way you're just verifying that all your brakes are working properly. Now I just installed these so I already know that they all work but if you're doing this at home it's always a good check to do. And that completes our installation and look at Curt's breakaway switch..