Replacement Dash Mount Connector for Brake Buddy Systems - Classic II and 3 - Select II and 3

Video Transcript for Brake Buddy Supplemental Braking Systems Dash Mount Connector Install - 2019 Chevrolet Equinox

Hi there, Chevy owners. Today, on your 2019 Chevrolet Equinox, we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install Brake Buddy's dash mounted connector and wiring harness. The Brake Buddy in dash harness is used to get a connector here on the inside so you can quickly and easily plug in your portable breaking system. This way you can have your breakaway switch outside. You can run all your wires connected to this harness. So that way we've got a nice, easy plug here.

The harness replacement is nice if you've got your brake buddy here, and maybe you just switched to a new vehicle and you're gonna plan on reusing your brake buddy and your new vehicle. But when you go to pull your wiring out you've probably cut all the wiring to length for your previous vehicle and stuff. So when you go to try to reuse that stuff a lot of times, it just doesn't quite line up like you wanted to. Maybe when you got rid of the vehicle you didn't pull all the components out of there, so you're missing that in dash harness. So you can purchase that component here and get that moved over to your new vehicle.

Or maybe you just gotta Brake Buddy from a buddy or something and you're looking for all the components to get it set up. We've got each piece that you would need here at Etrailer to piece together and get this up and going. We'll begin our installation here on the driver's side. you can see there's your brake pedal. We have a grommet located here inside of our vehicle.

We're gonna move to the left of our brake pedal and then straight back towards the firewall. You will have to peel back some of the carpet here to access a grommet. We need this grommet here to be able to feed our wiring through. And I went ahead and just took my razor knife, and I put a plus, we went to the left of where the main wire harness is in this kind of flat spot area. And then I just poked my screwdriver through it.

And then I double checked on the other side, make sure everything looked good, we weren't damage any wiring. Once we verified that with our screwdriver I then took some airline hose and I just poked that through there, 'cause we're gonna use this as a fish wire to pull our wiring through. Now, if you're doing this at home, there's a good chance you don't have airline tubing but what you probably do have is a metal coat hanger and those work really well for feeding wires through. So go ahead and get that set up just like this. Once you've got it set up we'll pull it through using electrical tape. and we'll tape our wiring here, this is the harness that we're gonna be installing, to our tubing there. So we're just gonna use the tape here. When you're taping your wiring to it I highly recommend all the wires are covered, 'cause if you don't cover the ends, they can fold over and make it really difficult if you get it to pass through. So straighten them all out, get 'em kind of close together. Get it up here on your wiring. And I usually start kind of lower down here. That way we get plenty of grab on it since we're pretty far down but then we're gonna work our way up, making sure that we cover all these all the way up. 'Cause what'll happen is they'll fold over and then you'll never get this to pass through that grommet. But if you cover 'em up and it's kind of tapered like, it'll pass through a whole lot easier. So once we get that all the way wrapped up, there, that looks pretty good. We can now pull 'em, pull it on through. And I wanna put just, this is such a thick piece of wire. We're gonna double it up, back here in the back. 'Cause I feel like it may want to pull off of our airline tube, cause this is really thick. All right, so we've got that pretty well taped there. So now we'll go ahead and pull it through. Now, one of the things I did find that helps get this to pull through easier, is a little bit of silicone spray. We're actually gonna put a little bit right here where it starts to taper. And that way, when we hit this point, that lubricant will help that just kind of slide through our grommet. So I'm gonna head to the other side now, we're gonna pull that on through. All right, so now we've got our wiring through, we just need to get the kind of depth set for how deep we want it. I am gonna pass it up above. This is the vent duct where it blows out on your feet. We're gonna pass it on top of that, that'll keep the wiring up so it isn't gonna fall down near our feet. And then I'm just gonna keep on feeding some of this through here. Until we get it to a point where we want it. We're gonna probably just mount it right here to the bottom of this lip. Be careful, there is an airbag component potentially up a little higher in a bracket. So just make sure you feel behind it to make sure you've got clearance. We do have a pretty big amount of clearance there, almost, not quite two fingers worth, but pretty good amount. All right, so that's pretty close to being fed to where we want it there. Maybe a little bit more fed through. All right, that looks pretty good. From there we should be able to mount it to the bottom of our paneling right here. You can see there are two places to slide fasteners through. You don't get me included with the kit. So we're just gonna be using some self tapping screws to run 'em into the bottom there. We'll use an eight millimeter screw, I mean, an eight millimeter socket for the fasteners that we're using here. Slide it up through the hole in your connector and then run this right up into the paneling. So we're not going crazy tight with it yet 'cause we wanna be able to kind of slide it around so we can make it look nice. We can then take our other fastener, slide it on through. Make sure you get it where you want it. Screw that on up. So then we can kind of, just loosen them a smidge, make it till it's roughly even and snug them down. And It is just plastic, so we don't want to go too crazy tight with it. It's just gotta be secure on there so we can make our connection. And that feels plenty secure right there. So now, for your wiring, if you need to you can feed a little bit less or more through as necessary but this all looks pretty good right there. It's gonna stay plenty out of our way and pass through. Everything looks good there. So we can now head out on the outside and start making our connections. Our grommet is located just behind your coolant reservoir, this little bubble right here. So just behind that and down is where you're gonna find that grommet. So go ahead and reach back here and grab your wiring and go ahead and pull it forward. We kind of fed it up this way first and then I fed it around the side of the battery after grabbing it from back here. And we got four wires we'll need to make connections to on our circuits here. The brown and the red we will be hooking to our breakaway switch. It doesn't matter which breakaway switch wire goes where, any breakaway, because you are gonna have two breakaway switch wires. choose one and put it there, choose the other and put it there ,it doesn't matter. Our white wire is our ground wire and our black wire is our positive wire. So first thing we're gonna do is just get that breakaway switch hooked up. Our breakaway switch is mounted at the front. Here's the leads that are coming from our breakaway switch. I'm gonna route the breakaway switch wire probably down like this, to where we meet our harness and then I'll run it back up. Something like this, probably. And then I'll trim it off. I'll trim off my excess about right there. So we'll cut off the excess and then we'll start hooking it in to our connector. After trimming off your excess you'll want to separate your wires if they are together. Some breakaway switch wires are in a duplex like this, where they're kind of molded together. So you just snip in between 'em and peel 'em off. If they're not together, then you don't have to do that. But then strip back each end of these. And then we'll crimp 'em on to our brown and our red here. So we are gonna use heat shrink butt connectors for these. Since they, these wires are outside of our vehicle here, the heat shrink butt connectors will protect it from the elements. So we're just gonna take one here, slide it onto our wire. Crimp it down And then we'll hook this to the brown wire. Just because brown and black are a little closer. But again, it doesn't really matter. Either breakaway switch wire works. And then we'll hook our red wire to the other red wire over there. Just 'cause I just will keep color continuity if we can. Just double check our circuits, make sure they're not gonna pull off of there. Everything looks good there. Okay so, now we've got power and ground left. For our power wire we're gonna hook that to our battery positive, but you don't wanna hook it directly to battery positive. That'll leave you with an unprotected circuit going inside. That's a potentially dangerous situation. So we're gonna install a few harness in line. It doesn't come with your harness here. This is something you have to purchase separately, but I highly recommended for protection purposes to make sure that you're electrically safe. So we're gonna add this to the black wire, since this is gonna connect to our battery, that'll put a fuse in line for us, to keep us safe there. So I've already got my butt connector on there, so we're just gonna crimp this onto the other side here. Now, typically your fuse harnesses don't come with the butt connectors and ring terminals on 'em. I went ahead and put those on there myself. So you will need to probably provide those as well. All right, so we got that connected on there. This guy's gonna go back to our battery roughly over there and make a connection underneath this compartment here. We can go ahead and make that connection now. So we'll just lift up on our compartment, got a couple of clips you gotta release, So that way that flips open. After that flips open, we're gonna use this fastener there, looks like it's probably a 13 millimeter, and we will slide our ring terminal on it and reinstall that screw. So we'll just zip it off of there. And that is the 13 millimeter. Remove your nut, slide your ring terminal on, reinstall your nut. And we can zip that back down. And our wires Should be able to kind of just poke down there on the side and our cover should still reinstall. So now for our ground. Our ground wire here is just in kind of a poor spot. It's a little bit too far away from any grounding spot inside of our harness. So you could cut the harness open to pull that wire out but, we've got some extra wire left over that we trimmed off of our breakaway switch. So we might as well use that to make a small jumper here. So we're gonna put a ring terminal on the end of our jumper. If you did want to cut the harness open and pull that wire out of there, you could put your ring terminal directly onto the white wire and just hook that to ground. But we're extending it a little bit. We're gonna attach it to the ground post located right here. So we'll remove that. That will also be our 13 millimeter socket. Slide that off of there, slide your ground wire on. And then just reinstall it. Then we can take our ground wire and bring it over towards our other wiring. I think we're probably gonna maybe slide it down underneath this guy. That way it can go forward kind of sit in between these two boxes and then it can come up and make our connection right there. That's pretty good. We'll probably trim a little bit of this off, something like that. And then we can strip that back and make our butt connection there. All right, so we've got our connection made there. Now all we need to do is, each of these butt connectors that we put on, we're gonna grab our heat gun and shrink 'em down to seal it up. You do wanna kind of pull it up away from your plastic components, like those lids. The heat gun can deform the covers. If you need a heat gun, you can get one here at Etrailer, from performance tools. I'm using one of their smaller models. I actually like this for automotive applications. It fits down into areas a little bit better. It's not quite as high powered, but I kind of like that because again, some of these plastic components on these vehicles, they melt very quickly and easily and deform. So having a slightly lower power heat gun helps you distribute the heat exactly where you want it. Once you've got all of your connections made, we can just take our wiring here and we're gonna use a cable tie and just secure it to this factory harness. We are trying to make sure that we don't obstruct any of our covers from opening. So make sure you pull yourself enough slack and stuff like that, to where you can still open all your covers. And when our cable ties around there and secure it in place. Now cable ties do not come included with your harness but you can get those here at Etrailer if you need some. So now at this point, just drop your Brake Buddy in here and plug in your cable. It should power up, just like you see here. We just got done doing the setup feature to make sure everything comes up green, and it did. So the only other thing that I'm gonna do just to verify that everything's working here, our connector harness that we installed we incorporated the breakaway switch into it. So I'm gonna pull the breakaway switch pin and the unit here should activate. And if it does our harness installation's complete and everything's working the way it should. And looks like our unit did activate, so we are good to go. And that completes our installation of Brake Buddy's dash mounted wiring connector and harness on our 2019 Chevrolet Equinox..