Curt T-Connector Vehicle Wiring Harness with 4-Pole Flat Trailer Connector

Video Transcript for Curt T-Connector Vehicle Wiring Harness Installation - 2017 Lincoln MKX

Ryan: Hey everybody. My name is Ryan, and here at etrailer, we install, test, fit, and review a lot of different parts. That way we can try to answer any questions those of you might have. And that's exactly what we're doing today on our 2017 Lincoln MKX. We're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Curt T connector vehicle wiring harness. So whenever you're pulling a trailer, you want your lights to be working.

That way, everyone around you can see you and know what your intentions are as you're going down the road. And that's exactly what this wiring kit is going to do. It's going to provide us with those necessary lighting functions, not only to keep us safe, but legal as well. Now, the wiring does live outside of the vehicle here. And what I've done is this use the dust cover to secure it around our hitch.And honestly, I think it looks pretty clean.

I did add some of this plastic wire loom just to help clean up the look. This isn't included, but you can pick some up here at etrailer. with that being said, I really don't think it's all that noticeable. There is some bracketry available that would allow you to kind of permanently mount it in one position out here. But honestly, I think if you did that, the bracket would almost be more noticeable than just your wiring hanging down.

But that being said, you'll have a couple of different options oo how you can actually mount this and you can pick one out, whatever you like best. Now, since this does stay outside, even though it is built really well and is protected by our dust cover, I do recommend to go a step further every now and again, and just apply some dielectric grease to those terminals.And that will ensure we're not going to have to worry about any corrosion and that this will work for a very long time. So one thing I really do like about this kit is the fact that it uses a module box. So what that's going to do is protect our vehicle's factory wiring if a short or an electrical issue we're to occur on the trailer side. And for me, that would really put my mind at ease, especially with these Lincolns.

They have really complicated electrical systems and you don't want to do anything to jeopardize that. And with this kit, that's one less thing you're going to have to worry about doing. So at the end of the day, a wiring kit you really can't go wrong with. I think it should work out real well for you.Now, as far as the installation goes, I'm not going to lie. It is a little involved and does take a little bit of time, but I'll show you a couple tips and tricks along the way that'll make that process a little bit easier on you. Speaking of which, let's go ahead and hook the wiring up together now.To begin our install, we're going to be here at the back of our Lincoln and we're going to need to remove our tail lights. So we'll go ahead and open up our hatch. That way we can get access to the fasteners. So if you look right here, there's going to be a cover. And I'm going to take a pick, you can also use a flathead screwdriver. We're just going to kind of pry underneath there and set that cover to the side, and that's going to expose a fastener behind it. I'm going to use a T25 Torx bit to pull that fastener out.Now we should be able to remove our tail light. So what you want to do is kind of grab it and rock it back and forth. There's some pins back here that kind of keeps it in there tight, and you want to be careful not to break them. So if you just kind of gradually wiggle it around and put some pressure on it going towards the back of our vehicle, eventually we'll get it to pop out. Once we have it out, you can get it disconnected. There's a wire that comes from the light, and if you follow that down here to see our connector right there.So to disconnect it, it's going to be a tab. Push down on it, pull it out, and that will separate it. So there's a better look at that tab. With this arm out of the way, I'll set it off to the side and repeat the same process to get our other tail light removed. Now what we can do this move to our rear wheel wells and remove some fasteners. That way we can start to kind of pull our facia away and give us some room. But we're going to have a total of seven pushpin style fasteners, just like this one here, that we need to take out just all along this edge. So you can grab a trim tool or a flathead screwdriver to pry underneath the head of it.You can kind of pry to meet the base and get that whole fastener removed. I'm going to use that same process to get the rest of them out. Once we have all those removed, you can kind of just grab the wheel liner and push it back a little bit. And then if you grab this piece of plastic here, just snap that out up until it about meets where the facia and quarter panel come in contact. And if we look right there, we're going to have another Torx bit screw we need to take out. So I'll use a T20 to do that.And I want to mention from this point on anything we do to one side of our vehicle, we're also going to do to the other side, because it will be set up the exact same way. So now here on one side, we can start to kind of pull our facia away from our vehicle. And what I did was just use some painters tape here on the body line. That way we don't have to worry about accidentally scratching our paint or anything like that. With that being said, you're just going to put gentle pressure pulling outwards, releasing the clips. And we don't want to go too far. You want to come up until about we get to the tail light and stop right there. We don't want to do the same thing on the passenger side just yet. We're going to leave that attached, get some of our wiring ran up through here, re-secure it, and then we can worry about the passenger side.With our facia gently pulled back, now we're going to have a little bit of room to work there in our tail light pocket. We need to get some wiring ran up through here. So what I'm going to do is use a pull wire. I'm just using a piece of nylon tube. You can use a coat hanger, something like that. Whenever you have around the house. And I'm going to push this all the way down. That way, it'll drop out from the bottom side of our vehicle and we can attach our wiring to it. So here where our pull wire dropped out from under the vehicle, I took our wiring harness and I took the T connector side that has a yellow, brown, and white wires, and I just taped it to that pull wire. So now what we should be able to do is feed this up into our tail light pocket.Once we have it up here, I'll go ahead and pull our tape off. And then what we're able to do is actually plug it into our factory connector there. Once I get this removed, we can take this connector, plug it in. There will be a small red tab there as well. I can kind of bend this, so you get a better angle there. That red connector, once you plug this in, you want to push that down. That's just a locking tab.Now that we have our connectors up here where they need to be, we want to re-secure the side of the facia. So this is pretty straightforward. You simply just line it all back up and push it back into place. So I went ahead and did the same thing over here on the passenger side. I kind of pulled our facia away a little bit and routed a pull wire down through that opening. We're just going to let this kind of hang for now, and that way it's ready whenever we go underneath our vehicle and route our wire over here. So I'll go ahead and do that now and show you the path that I took.Now underneath of our Lincoln, I went ahead and routed our four pole connector wiring, as well as our green T connector wiring. And when you route this, you want to kind of think ahead and you want to to do your best to avoid any hot or moving parts. For the time being, our wiring is close to our exhaust, but once we get everything hooked up, we're going to come back here and zip tie and secure this wiring up and out of the way. So just keep that in mind.What I did is I routed it up and over the tailpipe there and started to bring it along towards the center. Our four way connector, I just dropped down here and put it on our hitch. The green wire continues up along through here, and where it comes up and over our tail pipe as well. So that's where it drops down, and then I went ahead and just taped it to our pull wire. That way we can go back up top and pull this connector into the tail light pocket.Back up top here on the passenger side, we can work our wiring up to the tail light pocket, tape out of the way. And just like the other side, we're going to take this connector, plug it into the factory connector, and don't forget to push down on your red locking tab. Now you got that one hooked up, we'll go ahead and push our facia back into place.What we can do now is grab our tail light, plug it in to the other side of our T connector, and then re-install it the opposite way that we removed it. So when you're re-installing this, you want to make sure to kind of tuck your wiring down in there. That way we don't pinch it or anything like that. That's really the only difference you have to pay attention to. Other than that, the light'll pop right back into place and we can re-secure it. Then we can do the same thing over here on the driver's side. That plugged in, tucked away, and the light re-installed.Now back underneath our vehicle over here on the driver's side, we're going to have this small panel that we need to remove. That way we can have a spot to mount our module box. It's going to be held in place. We're going to have two fasteners down here. And these are actually a five and a half millimeter, so I'll go ahead and get my socket and get that as removed. And if you kind of follow our panel up, if you look up here, you can see we're going to have two more fasteners and those are going to be 10 millimeters. Get those removed, and then our panel should be able to drop down where we can set it off to the side.Now, what I went ahead and did is secured our module box right here, and I just used some zip ties, and there's a big bundle of factory wiring that I was able to secure our module box too. So that's how it turned out. And while I was at it, I secured our other wires as well. So particularly our green wire and our four way connector wire. And this is how it turned out. Just zip tied it along the way, again, keeping it as far away from our exhaust as possible. Kind of runs up on top of our hitch. So I used some zip ties more or less all the way along the whole side. And again, just where it shoots up into the tail light pocket. Now we can take our white wire with the pre-attached ring terminal and ground it to the body of our vehicle. Think I'm going to go right here where the metal is double layered, nice and thick. That should provide us with the good ground. I'm just going to use a self tapping screw that they give us with the kit to get that secured.And finally, we can hook up our power wire, which is this black wire here that comes out of our module box. What you're going to do is take a butt connector. I'm using a heat shrink butt connector since this will be underneath the vehicle and the heat shrink offers a little more protection. But the one that comes with the kit will work just fine. Or if you'd rather use these, you can find them here at etrailer. You're going to slide the bearing to the wire into that butt connector and crimp it down. What we can do is, if you grab your big bundle of black power wire that came with the kit, which is this here, you're going to take one end of it, strip back some of the installation to expose that bare wire underneath, and then you're just going to plug that in to the other end of the butt connector. So we'll get that in there, grab my crimps, and crimp it down. And that's going to complete that connection there. Now, since this is a heat shrink butt connector, I can grab my heat gun and seal up the ends.With that all sealed up, what I'll do is route our main power wire up into the engine compartment. That way we can connect it to the battery. So I'll go ahead and route that now, and then I'll show you the path I took to get there. So I just secured it right here and there, went up and over our subframe. And it's a little tricky to see, but you can actually reach up there and grab it. This is where the wire drops down from going over our subframe. Secured it there, and kind of just went along the side of our fuel tank. And at this point I cut in towards the center. So you can see that wire there. Then what I did was this loosen up this panel. It made a little easier. There's a couple of nuts that you can pull off, and then you're able to kind of pull it down. Alongside of that, we can just follow these factory lines pretty much all the way towards the front.So once I got to about this point here, I was able to route our wire up into the engine compartment. Now, the way I got it up there was using a pull wire, just like we did with our tail lights. So I dropped that pull wire down, taped our power wire to it, and was able to pull it back up. And that's how I got it inside of the engine compartment. So before we go under the hood and hook up our power wire, while we're underneath the car, it'd be a great time to re-install this panel the opposite way that we removed it.So now here in the engine compartment, here's where our power wire came up. And what we're going to do is strip back some the installation there, put on a butt connector, get that crimped down. And then we can grab our included fuse holder. Make sure the fuse is not installed at this time. One end of it is going to go into the butt connector, which we'll crimp down. The other end of our fuse holder is going to receive a ring terminal, so we'll slide that on as well. Then once I have this crimped down, I'll come back with my heat gun and seal up the ends on our butt connector.Now that we have our fuse holder all put together and everything, we can come to our positive battery terminal, remove that cover. And I'm going to loosen up this nut here. I'm not going to take this nut completely off. They're not really designed to do that. If you force it off, you could damage the threads and it'll be kind of hard to get back together. So I'll just loosen it enough. You'll feel it kind of stop, get hung up a little bit, and that's as far as we need to go.So what I'm going to do to get our ring terminal in there is actually cut a small opening in it. Just take my snips, cut an opening. What I like to do since it's a relatively large ring terminal, I like to try to make it a little smaller. So I kind of just squeeze it together a little bit and come back and re cut that opening. That way it's just not so large that it's going to move around a whole lot. So I'll get that like so, then we can slide it behind the nut, kind of hold it in place. Then just tighten the nut back down.Once you have it nice and tight, just close up your cap, come back to your fuse holder, take our included fuse, pop that in, and close up the cover. Now that we have everything hooked up, it's a good idea to test your wiring to make sure that it's functioning properly. That being said, we can try our left turn signal, our right turn signal, our brake lights, and our running lights. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Curt T connector vehicle wiring harness on our 2017 Lincoln MKX.