The wiring, dream? or nightmare? you decide...

Since our last post I was able to finally sort-out the wiring on the trailer. The trailer came with a set of lights and had the easiest to read instructions (Being very sarcastic here). I layed it out and set up the trailer exactly per the instructions, you know, the nice instructions of attach green wire to yellow, etc. I think there was something lost in translation.

So at the end of what should have been a simple wiring job I had a wired car, a wired trailer and the final connection was ready. Away we go right? WRONG! The blinkers worked, but every time I hit the brakes the blinker stopped, or something else randomly lit-up.

A bit of research later on the internet and I made a determining factor that there was a grounding issue with the trailer.

This is me giving up on the first night, wiring just isn't my calling apparently...

Night 2 ended up being a bit more productive, sort of... I re-wired the entire trailer again, scraped off all the paint around each bolt holding the lights together, it turns out that each light uses the bolt which holds it to the frame as the grounding location. Would that do the trick? Nope! I gave up, we went back to our parents house for Christmas as failures in our own eyes. It was a good holiday though, lots of construction items which I'll talk about later on.

Before we left the next day I ordered a wiring kit offline which would just connect into my brake lights on the car, I figured my hack wiring job on the car would probably be the issue all along.

After ordering this we came back to our home from Christmas vacation and attempted to hook it up, all was smooth running except the trailer still didn't want to work!

I was absolutely amazed at how easy it was to connect, the hardest part was running the wire directly from my battery to the light controller.

Solution #12,345. I ran a ground cable from each light individually back to a single point on the trailer, and voila! We have lights! It just goes to show you how the simplest thing can become such a chore!

Lights done, now for a test drive!