Towing Kit w/ Ball Mount and Trailer Wiring for Stealth Hitches Hidden Rack Receiver - 2" Ball

Video Transcript for Stealth Hitches Towing Kit with Ball Mount and Trailer Wiring Installation - 2017 Audi Q7

Hey everyone, Shane here with etrailer.com Today, I have a 2017 Audi Q7. I'm gonna walk you how to install Stealth Hitch Towing Kit. Why would we need the Stealth Hitch Tiwing Kit Well, let's say we, we purchased the hitch with the receiver tube on it for bike racks and cargo carriers, that one's not designed for towing. In my opinion, rather than getting the receiver tube for bike racks and cargo carriers, and then later on down the road behind the ball mount and the wiring, if you have any thought in your mind that you're ever gonna tow just buy the kit. You get the kit that comes with everything in it, because you do have to remove your fascia to put the hitch on and you will have to remove the fascia to put the wiring on. So it's better to do it all at one time, cut out this bottom section one time, reinstall it all when it's all done, and then you're finished.

If you buy them separate, you're gonna have to take the fascia off twice, you're gonna have to cut an extra off and then reinstall everything again. This kit is gonna come with a ball mount. The ball is gonna have to be mounted to the bracket. Just make sure you're following instructions for torquing the nut. 'Cause you're gonna install the same way that your receiver tube installs, push it up into place until it clicks.

It's gonna remove the same way, and it's gonna lock the same way. And another thing about this kit is not only does it come with a seven pole plug, but it's also gonna come with installed all the wiring itself is gonna come with your reverse wire and your brake controller wire if you happen to have a trailer that has brakes on it. Another nice thing, it's gonna come with an adapter. With this adapter is, if you pull a trailer that has four pole plug, you simply plug the seven pole in into your plug here, then you can put in a four pole plug from a trailer. This kit is gonna come with everything you need to get it installed.

You're gonna have plenty of wire, not only to get through the wiring inside that you need to tie into, but also to get to your battery. It's gonna come with your bracket, to attach your seven pole plug. As I mentioned before, the four pole adapter. As far as the installation process, it's really not that difficult. It's pretty straightforward.

It is a little bit time consuming because you do have to take the fascia off, which is why I recommended, if you ever plan on towing, go ahead and install the wiring along with the hitch so you taking the fascia off all at one time. Now we've gone over some of the features, I'll just walk you with how to get it installed. To start our installation, on each side of the vehicle, behind the tire, we'll remove two screws with a T25 Torx bit that are right here on the inside, holding our fender liner in place. We're gonna pull our fender liner back. We're gonna have one right here we need to remove. On the inner, on each side, we're gonna have four screws we need to remove. Two on the outside, we're gonna have two right here. This is gonna be towards right behind the rear wheel. And then, on the lower part of our fascia, left and right of center, we're gonna have two screws we need to remove. I'm gonna take some tape, if you want to. I like to do it to help protect the paint. We're gonna go right here, right where this trim piece meets this front piece. And go right on this edge. It doesn't have to be big. We're gonna pull out, we're gonna take a trim panel tool, kinda get it back in the inside here if you can. There's some clips in there that we need to release. We're just gonna pull out it. And get that to pop this. And I'm gonna work down, popping them up until we get to about right here. So the bottom two are a little bit different. They're gonna have these little wings on them. What you're do is reach back, there was an opening, take a small stubby screwdriver, and you're gonna push down on one and up on the other, and you're gonna pop it out of that clip. So here is the bottom of it. There's an opening right on the backside. And then take your screwdriver, push it down, and that up. Next on this side, we need to remove these two screws. Same bit. We're gonna tape these two edges. So next, we're gonna start pulling our fascia loose from the top part of our body. In the instructions, they're gonna show you the trim panel tool. I find that I can do it like this. Less pressure we put in between these two pieces in that seam, the less chance we're gonna have of chipping any paint within there. So, just take your time with it. You're gonna kinda push up and pull out, similar to that. We're gonna get our fascia loose to about right here. Then we're gonna have an extra set of hands, stand on this side and hold this piece. We're gonna go over to the passenger side, and we're in our work our way across. The reason we have to do that is there's an electrical connector located right behind the panel here that can not be disconnected. If it is disconnected, the car has to get reprogrammed. So what you need to do is have a table, have something that's elevated with a blanket. Anything that when you set the fascial on it, it's not going to get damaged. So we're gonna set it right over here by our driver's corner. Now with our extra set of hands over on the driver's side, we're gonna start working our way across, let you pull it up here. There we go. So since our wiring is so short here, there's a couple of clips that hold it onto the fascia. We're on the zip ties that are running around there, we can replace those. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna cut the zip ties and give us a little extra length so that the side over here, doesn't hit the body. Make sure you don't cut the wire itself. That'll give us enough room to work where our bumper beam is. You can see where this panel, where my hand is, could make contact here if we move the cart out. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move it back and I'm gonna take this whole area right here. So, if this makes contact with that, we don't have any paint problems. When it comes to the inside, we're gonna remove the threshold here, we're gonna remove by just pulling it up and then we'll set it aside. Now we'll take a T40 Torx bit, we're gonna move this pole. it's holding down our rear tie down, on our driver's side. We're gonna take either a small flat head screwdriver or a. pin like this. Right in the back here, there's a little panel. At the very top, there's a little slot. We need to get that little panel out to access the screw behind it. We'll take our T25 Torx bit, remove that one. Remove the net here and this panel. You're gonna take this panel and you're gonna kinda pull it loose from the top. You can see the little tabs there. Once you get the top side out, pull up on it and you can lift it off of this piece and then slide it forward. Give you a little bit more room to work. Our wiring harness, on one end, or one side of our converter box, we're gonna have wiring that looks like this. It's got some covering on it. This end is gonna go down through and then come outside and over to the center to the receiver as I mentioned a few minutes ago. Again, you're gonna kind of have to reach down in this area, kinda down back in that corner and reach your hand kinda around. You'll feel the edge of a plate there. Just kinda reach around it and you'll be able to touch your two hands. So when you take this and feed it around you can reach in here and grab it, pull it out. If you're gonna be towing a trailer with brakes, blue one's gonna be for a brake signal. If you wanna hook up a reverse wire, you're gonna hook up the reverse wire. In our case, we're not gonna be hooking those up. These would be hooked up somewhere inside the vehicle. So, we're just gonna leave these tucked in here. That way, if they decide later on, that you want to and go ahead and find those wires and hook those up. Next, we're gonna take our black and white wire, which is gonna be our power and ground. We're gonna route it out the same way, the black wire for power, pass or run to the battery or to a positive source. Our battery is located underneath our passenger seat. It would take a while for me to try and get all of his interior panels off and get it wired up that way. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come out, I'm gonna go underneath. There's a cardboard panel that runs underneath that side and it runs all the way up underneath the passenger side seat. So we can lower that panel, we can drill a small hole in the bottom where our battery container is, run the wire up through it, hook it into the battery, seal the bottom of that hole, and put the cardboard panel back up and you're never gonna know it's there. So, we're gonna wire, get these out the same way before we mount our converter box. The kit is gonna come with some two sided sticky tape. I'll peel off one side, we'll stick it on our converter box like this. And right then, I'll set it right here. Basically straight back from here. It's flat right there, right in that area. We're gonna take our converter box and we can stick it right against that back wall there. We have four wires that we're gonna have to route up behind this panel all the way up to here. And this is where we're gonna tie into the wiring that's in our tailgate or lift gate. The four wires, we're not gonna use all of them, we're not actually gonna use the red one. Because on this vehicle, the brake signal and turn signal are on one wire, however it can be confusing because they tend to separate up here. So, if you happen to hook this up and you tested it's not working correctly, cut this wire off and then test it again. Probably gonna work right the next time. So we're just gonna be hooking up these three wires. You have your green wire, which is your passenger side brake and turn signal, yellow wire, which is your driver's side brake and turn signal, brown wire, which is gonna be your running lights. And we're gonna go ahead and remove this top center panel. We're gonna kinda pull down and back just a little bit like that. The wires we're gonna be tying into are actually inside of here. So we're gonna cut some of this off. You just want to be careful when you cut it, or you don't nick any of the wires. Now, you wanna make sure when you test, you have the gate closed. If you don't have the gate close, they're gonna test that on the fascia. And we don't want them to do that. We wanna get the proper wires that are testing for the gate. Right now, we have our right turn signal on. It is gonna be the gray wire with a black stripe. It would be kinda hard to see the black stripe 'cause it's down on the bottom. Now we'll test our left, which is going to be a white stripe, I'm sorry, a white wire with a gray stripe. Switch this over. And when you do test for running lights signal. There's gonna be three gray wires. You're gonna have to test each one in order to determine which one you're gonna use. You just want to make sure it's the one that when you have the running lights on that wire are you got the signal from and when you turn it off, the power goes off. So now that we know which wires we're gonna be using, we can go back outside and make our, and get our green, yellow, and brown wire ran up and make our connections sure are the proper wires. We're gonna add some quick connector that are gonna look like this. On one side, just black, the other side has the silver connector in it. We're gonna use the wire on the black side. We're gonna kind of push it into place. We're actually doing the running lights signal right at this moment. So, we'll take our brown wire, do it like that, then close these two together. We'll take a pair of pliers, careful, and then hold it together. We're gonna do the same thing on right turn signal. It's gonna be our green wire. And again with our white pair. Put our panel back in place. We're gonna get our power wire ran, our ground wire, and then our seven pole or our wires connected to our seven pole. We'll test it all out, make sure it's working correctly. Once we know it's worked correctly, then we can come back and we put all this back together. I'm gonna start with my ground wire. We can ground it on metal. This is a little bit thin. So actually, what I think I'm gonna do so I'm gonna come over here towards the center of the body, I might ground it right there. We'll just measure it out, cut the sides, strip back the end, add on a connector. Take the self tapping screw. And we'll take our black wire, strip it back, we're gonna add on heat shrink butt connector that comes in the kit. Then we're gonna take the bundle of black wire, strip back the end, we're gonna add it in the other side of the butt connector. Take our heat source, shrink our butt connector. If you don't have a heat gun, you could find that here are etrailer. And we're gonna go ahead and get our seven pole plug and brackets installed. You're gonna loosen this screw right back here, you don't need to take it out all the way. We're gonna take out these two. You have one here, one on the opposite side. Pull this out, take your screwdriver and stick it in the backside. We'll pop it up, just like that. We're gonna take our wires, we're gonna feed them through here, and out the front. On the back of our plug, we're gonna mark what color wire goes where. Take that out with our flathead. We're gonna loosen the screw, you don't need to take it out all the way. This little plate will separate. You're gonna take the wire after you get them all stripped back. We're gonna feed it right in between that plate and then back in place. And we just tighten the screw down. Here to repeat that for the rest of it. One thing I want to note, is, even though these are marked or tell you the color of the wire, go ahead match all the colors where they go. Purple wire's gonna go in the center. Once you get them all connected, the brown and green wire, switch it. So brown is gonna go to green, green's gonna go to brown. Once you get those connected, or switched, you can reinsert the connector inside. On the bottom of it, there's gonna be an open slot that needs to be at the bottom. Once you get it back in place, tighten this screw, it's gonna hold your wires in place. And then reinstall the two screws here. Next, we're gonna install the brackets. One of them is gonna look like this, where your two safety chain loops come down, you have two bolts that go through the side that have the nut on them. All we need to do to remove the nut. We don't have to remove the hole bolt. We're gonna take this bracket, we're gonna slide it to root top like that and then reinstall the two nuts. And when we wanna come back, we wanna retighten those and then retorque them to the specifications in the instructions. We're gonna have a bracket like this. You mount it either way. I'm actually gonna mount it this way so that it brings the plug down closer to the bottom of the fascia or the opening that we're gonna have to cut in the fascia. Take the hardware that comes in the kit. We'll tighten that down, then we can take this and then use the hardware and install it right around the other side of that. Next, we need to run our power wire. Two ways you can do it. You can run up to the engine compartment if you want to, or you can run to the battery. The online instruction, they're gonna tell you to run it up to the battery. Probably the driver's side and run it up, except, you'll exhaust those pipes are run up like this on each side of the engine. That means you're gonna have a hard time keeping that wire away from anything hot on that side. So, should be you run it right over to battery compartments. What I did there was ran my wire from here directly across went over top of this power line, over top all my suspension components. Got some hard lines up here, went over the top of them. And got some cardboard panels, one here, and one here, they're running right along this side. Take your T24 Torx bit or 25. You're gonna remove these screws, you have a couple of 10 millimeter head nuts, plastic nuts over here. Pull that down and you can route your line right up to right about here. This is where your battery pan is for your passenger compartment. Once you get your hole drilled, you're gonna need a pretty long drill bit, unless you take this whole panel off. If you take a whole panel off, keep in mind where your battery is sitting inside the pan. You're drilling, have a short amount or a small amount of space to drill a hole. So if you have a long drill, what I suggest going from top down. If you have a short one, or you don't have a long one, make it stay over close to the corner here. Once you get your holes drilled, get wire fed up inside. We're gonna measure out what we need to get to the positive side of the battery here. We'll add on our fuse holder, we'll make our connection. Next, we need to add our fuse holder. We're gonna go ahead and pull the fuse out. The ring terminal that's on here. We're actually gonna be replacing it with one that has a little bit smaller hole. The reason is, is that I don't wanna completely disconnect the battery. This nut right here is not designed to come all the way off. So we're just gonna loosen it up enough, we're gonna add on this ring terminal, and we're gonna cut a little spot in it and then we're gonna take it and we're just gonna slide it right behind the nut and tighten the nut back down. So go ahead and cut this one off. We'll add on our new one. Cut little section out, right here. Just like that. We're gonna take our black wire that we just spread up. And cut it aside. Now that we have everything connected on the back. We can go ahead and make this connection. 10 millimeter socket or wrench and then loosen this nut. Just enough where you can get the ring terminal slide back behind it. And I'm just gonna tighten it back down. Make sure it connected and install the fuse. We'll test everything out, make sure it's working correctly. Once we know it's working, we can start trimming out our fascia the rest of the way for the wiring and then reinstalling. Now we're gonna test out our wiring using an alternate power source. Left turn, right turn, break lights, running lights. Now we've tested out our wiring, we know it's working correctly, we need a trim out our fascia to fit our wiring. So, from where a hole was that we originally had in the bumper or the fascia, on the driver's side, we need to cut over another three and a half inches. Top and bottom we'll make it square and then we're gonna cut that out and that should give us enough room for our wiring. And go ahead and reinstall our panels on the inside. Take some electrical tape, wrap it around your wires up here, go ahead and put that panel back in place. And then you getting reinstall our fascia in reverse order from the way we took it off. Don't forget about your rubber plug that we took out for our wiring. We cut a little slit in it, right up to the center, we're gonna take this, feed our wiring around it and put this back in place. Once you have your fascia reinstalled, you're ready to go. That's gonna do for the look at and installation on the Stealth Hitch Towing Kit on 2017 Audi Q7..