Step-by-Step Connections & Safety Check for Hooking Up A Trailer | How To Tow
Time to make our connections, Autumn. All right, we’ve got a few steps to go through, but we’re going to take them one at a time. Cool. First thing we need to do is lower the trailer onto the hitch itself. As I start to lower the trailer, you’re going to notice that the tongue is starting to level out. And as it loads up onto our hitch, the rear bumper of our tow vehicle is also going to start to sag just a little bit. Now that I have the tongue hitch off of the ground, we’re going to move on to a few other steps and we’ll revisit this and make sure it’s nice and high before you pull away. Gotcha. Why don’t you come down here and we can start to put the other pieces together, starting with the chains. So, I’m going to go ahead and hand you yours. I’ll grab mine here. You’ve already pre-crossed these. So, you’re holding the right hand chain. I’m holding the lefth hand one. And we’re going to use these hook first and connect them into the eyelets next to the hitch. Good job. Fantastic. There it is. That basket that we’re looking for. That’s great. See the cross there? We’re going to go ahead and lock our hitch down there. And I’m going to plug in our seven pin connector. Now, we’ve got a tooth that aligns which way this is supposed to go. Right here on top of this plug. We need to invert it to plug it in appropriately. Gotcha. There we go. And it’s just going to rest just like that. And the last piece here is our breakaway line. Um, we’re going to install this uh in a very specific manner. You want to go ahead and grab that cord there, Autumn. Excellent. What I’d like you to do is thread one end through that same metal loop that you put your chain um end point onto. Okay. Excellent. Go ahead and thread it through itself. Perfect. And you can pull it tight. Does that look good? That looks great. Perfect. Last piece. We’re going to plug that key into the module for the breakaway. Right down here. Yep, that’s correct. Okay. Excellent. I think I got it. All right, that looks great. Okay, the last thing for us to do is continue to raise the trailer tongue jack here so it’s all the way up and out of the way. If you have your tongue jack too low, it may scrape on the pavement when you go up an incline. So, you always want to make sure to raise it as much as you can until a point that it stops spinning. Everything looks good, Autumn, but it never hurts to do one last safety check just to review all the connecting points that we have. Yep. So, we have the trailer hitch tongue jack all the way up and the handle is stowed. We have our seven pin connector connected to the truck. We have our hitch itself latched on. Our chains are hooked up and our emergency breakaway wire is also connected. Now, you’ll notice on the chains and the wire that these are dragging a little bit low. It’s probably important that we tighten these up because if they drag against the ground, not only can it damage the chains and the cable itself, they may not be able to do their job effectively. Now, we can shorten the chains using a really easy trick. What I’m going to do is I’ll take this chain off real quick, and I’m just going to spin it one direction. And as it spins, you’ll notice that this chain tots up and gets a little bit shorter. Oh, I see. We can do that with the other side as well to create that nice even basket. So, we’ll take it off here and then spin it in one direction. Either direction works. That should be good. And then put it back on. Excellent. Yep. That’s perfect. Now, your breakaway cable is the lowest hanging fruit right now. So, what we’re going to do is we’re just going to pull this a little bit tight so that it rides where it should. We always want to come back and check where this is sitting. And if we need to, we can create a shorter cable to make sure that it fits our connection appropriately. So, I just pull on this cable here and it’ll shorten it up. Yeah, that works. Like I said, we can always make a shorter cable, but we’re going to move on to the next step for now, which is checking your lights. All right, let’s do it. All right. Okay, Autumn, we’re going to test your brake lights first. So, go ahead and press on the brake pedal for me. Excellent. That looks great. Go ahead and pull your foot off the brake. All right. And we’re going to shift into reverse. Gotcha. Excellent. Okay. Let’s go back into park. And you can take your foot back off the brake. Great job. All right. All of our connections are secure on them. What’s the last thing on our checklist we need to do? Remove the chalks. That’s correct.
This video is designed to help you feel confident about hooking up a trailer and proper trailer connections for your Ford.
