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Trailer lights, trailer lights, white, brown, yellow, green, and blue
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They never work and they always fail. Which is why we are going to show you how to test them, install them, and some tips to make them last longer
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Since trailer lights never seem to last very long, we'll be giving away a brand new trailer light set in this video, so you'll have a
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spare set whenever your lights start to give you trouble. Now you will need to know how to test the lights before messing with them. And luckily, trailer lights are super easy to test. All you need is a battery and two jumper cables. Any 12-volt battery will work. You could even use a jump pack or battery charger if that's easier. The main thing you need to know is that the white wire is the ground wire. This is usually attached straight to the trailer and uses the trailer to supply the ground to all the separate lights. This wire is probably the number one
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cause for lights to be messing up. The next cause would probably be the lights themselves from being
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dunked in water so many times that they fill up with water and just stop working, which eventually
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always happens no matter what you do. But the other wires, the brown, the yellow, and the green
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wires are for the individual lights. The brown is for the running lights, the yellow for the left
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side lights, and the green for the right side lights. Then the blue wire on the five wire plug is for
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the brake actuator, which we won't go over if you'll be. If you want to know more about trailer brakes, check out last week's video where we installed
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an entire disc brake system on this trailer. And we got our lights from boattrailerparts.com whenever we picked up all of the stuff that
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we have put on this trailer which you can check out by clicking the card in the top right hand corner of the screen To test them just take the negative cable and hook it up to the white wire on the plug Then take your positive cable and go to each of the other individual wires
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getting up and checking the lights as you put the power to them. If one of the lights doesn't come on, you can go to that light with your battery
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and apply power straight to the light to see if it comes on or not. If it doesn't, you need a light
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If it does, then you'll need to clean the ground or properly. probably run a new wire to that light because the power wire has probably broken somewhere
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The good thing about trailer lights is that they are fairly cheap and you can completely
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install all new lights and run entirely new wire harness on the trailer in only a couple of hours
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Once you have finished testing all the lights on the trailer and have decided that it is time to
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replace them, we've got to get the old lights off the trailer
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You might find that a lot of times the bolts and nuts to the old lights are stripped out
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Don't spend too much time with this if they are stripped out in the plastic, just stick something behind the light and pry the light off
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breaking the plastic. Then you can simply put a set of vice grips on the bolt that's left
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behind and undo the nut or cut them off if need be. With the lights off, we can clean up all
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the locations where the bolts go through or anywhere that a ground wire is going to be
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attached to the trailer. You can use a polisher with a low-grit sanding pad on it
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or a good old wire brush to clean up all these locations before we install the new lights
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Which is pretty simple to do. To install the new lights, depending on your lights
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put the bolts in the light and then just put the light bolts through the trailer and put the
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nuts on and tighten them up. You can also cover the bolts with grease which is something that will help with the ground issue
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And that is to just cover the ground with grease or battery terminal protecting
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or if you would like to, you can even go to the point of running an extra ground wire from the front
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all the way to the light and eliminate using the trailer as the ground
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Which is the easy part in doing trailer lights, and that is running the wires to the lights from the front
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the front. The only part that takes a little effort is getting the wires through the front tubing
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in the trailer. For the brake actuator, the easiest way to get the blue wire up here is to run a
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wire from up by the actuator and out the front, then just take another wire and go from the side
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where the lights into the trailer and run that wire out the front as well. Now you can tie the two
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wires together with electrical tape and pull the wire coming from the top back through the hole
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in the side of the trailer where we can attach the blue wire and then just pull it up to the actuator and hook it up
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Then for our green, yellow, and brown wires, just cut off the old wires and leave a piece in the tube
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We'll just simply tape the new wires to them and feed them into the trailer and pull them out the back until you get them all the way out
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I like to take the white wire and then run it tight to the hole in the trailer where all the wires go in and use that as the
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length to leave outside of the trailer here in the front. Then we can take some electrical
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tape and wrap all these wires together to keep them in a nice bundle, only leaving a few
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inches of the white wire out because we'll put a new heat shrink end on that wire and
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attach it to the trailer Now hook up the blue wire to the brake actuator and the front is done where we can just simply run the brown yellow and green wires down the sides of the trailer and back to the lights for the running lights we just cut into the brown wire as it goes down the side of the trailer and put a heat shrink
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connector in it to connect the brown wire going to the running light that is on the
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side of the trailer to the brown wire going to the back which when it comes to
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hooking up the lights we recommend only using heat shrink connectors and
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making sure you heat them up to seal up the connection now just strapped down
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all the wiring and drop a comment below and let us know what you think about trailer lights
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Use a hashtag lights for your chance to win the brand new set of trailer lights
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And for some bonus clips, if your trailer doesn't have guide posts, these are super simple to install and a great feature to have on a trailer
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whenever you are trying to put a boat onto the trailer. All you need to do is measure the back of the boat that will be in between the posts
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and if you don't already have these holes back here for these you've been, you will have to drill them on each side of the I-beam and install these U-bolts here
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With those in and loose we can slide the guidepost into the U-bolts but don't tighten the nuts
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Now just measure the distance between the posts and match the distance of your boat
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Before tightening the nuts, double check that each post is the same distance away from the trailer ibeam just to
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center them up, double check your overall distance apart, and then tighten up the nuts and
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install the PVC tubes. Thank you all for hanging out with us this week, and we look forward to seeing you next week
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where we will be doing some super informational on the water how-to boating that you won't want to miss
