it used to work just fine....

then it didn't, have been fighting it for 9 months now.
fuses are all good....

Reading the Schematics is not real intuitive, because it says look at "Relay Box #4"

uh, where the hell is that?
the schematic says in Engine Bay near firewall....

damn there are a lot of relay boxes down there....
and my #13 hands don't fit in there so well...

but I finally pulled the cover off of a box with ONLY 2 relays in it....
now that makes sense, I hope.

pulled them out, plugged them back in, and holy cow, the Trailer Lights work

 

They gave you the fat finger discount and fixed it for you.

You have one of those circuit testers that plugs into the 7-way? A lot of guys are running on around with a blown fuse for the 12v power to charge the battery and run the electric tongue jack.

 

yup, bought that years ago, a real helper when chasing trailer light problems.
Is it good here? yes/no

Odd thing, that Relay also fixed the Backup circuit, and the 12 volt charger to trailer battery circuit... the Schematic does not give me the sense it would

 

Is there corrosion inside the backshell of the 7-blade connector? I have to replace mine every two years because of it.

 

Brand new harness for that precise reason.

I found the issue, it is the Relay in the Two Relay box, located in the Driver side corner, near the firewall and fender.

Wiggled the Relay, and now the trailer lights all work.

now that I have it working, I am going to pack the backside of that connector with Dielectric Grease which will keep water out of the connector.
a misconception of this grease, is people place it on the Contacts themselves, it is an Insulator, so that makes things worse.

https://www.waytekwire.com/catalog/c...lectric-grease

a better thing for contacts, is Fluid Film.

 

Every two years? That adds up!

Buy once, cry once, and do it only one more time.

Try Ford OEM 7 way blade RV trailer towing sockets.. They really are built better then the more commonly available aftermarket parts.






For more custom alternatives, a lot more work (and more money than even Ford parts at full dealership retail markup) is involved in keeping corrosion away from the back side of trailer harness connector wiring.

Arguably a tad bit overboard, but once I build it, I never see it again. Nor do I ever want to.

 

You don’t say? That’s because my connector was hanging down into the salty Minnesota winter road spray for over 20 years. I anticipate connector replacement where I am now will be significantly reduced.

 

that is a impressively clean set up there! are those food containers like used in restaurant industry?

 

Yes. You nailed it. Food containers.

Commercial restaurant / industrial food kitchen / steam table tray dishes are an excellent, low cost, corrosion resistant (stainless steel), pre-formed, 3 dimensional building material that I have utilized in one way or another on all of my custom commercial truck builds to create ideas from scratch, such as in the case above, or to solve problems where no existing OEM solution exists, such as in the case below, in a different truck:



In this case, the pitch angle of the OEM fuel port buckets supplied with the chassis cab would cause the service station nozzle to conflict with a reinforcement gusset of the vocational bed body, yet the fuel fill port could not be positioned anywhere else due to the addition of an aft of axle tool box.

After testing Ford, GM, and Ram fuel fill buckets with equally unacceptable results, it was time to make one. But how? Where can one get a 3 dimensional shape having a mounting flange, a flat plane, four walls perpendicular to the flat plane, a smoothly rounded radial transition between all five planes, a fully open sixth plane, all in corrosion resistant, diesel fuel safe, durable, UV stable, heat and cold tolerant, visually attractive material?

The kitchen, of course.















This is the acid fitment test. The position of the flange angles, held by pony clamps against a half of a basketball hoop post splice, is adjusted to determine the pitch angle of the upside down restaurant food dish, such that a service station fuel fill nozzle can be inserted and seat itself securely and unattended, with enough height above the fuel tank for the slope of the filler to tank inlet hose to have sufficient fall, while the fill nozzle clears the bed gusset in both the insertion and retraction directions.

That took a bit of fiddling and finesse to meet all of those requirements simultaneously, and nothing existed in the transportation industry to meet the need.

But the restaurant industry has got it covered.

And so does the recreation sports industry... I mentioned a basketball hoop post splice... a recycled one of those is the horizontal U shaped metal bracket that the restaurant dish is attached to, by way of the angled flanges temporarily held by those pony clamps for positioning.

That horizontal bracket started life at a sporting goods store, was brought home and assembled into a basketball hoop post, and wound up given away for free on Craigslist, which I scooped up, because metal material is SOOOOOOO expensive nowadays.

I wanted something that the fill hose could sneak underneath and inside of, yet I didn't want to add the weight of 1/4" angle iron to the truck. This material was thinner, lighter, and yet had a wider geometry in cross section that would make it stiffer and more resistant to bending when cantilevered a couple of feet away from the truck frame, weighed down by a nozzle and fill hose full of fuel.

But the recycled basketball hoop post needed a little straightening first.




Then a lot of wire brushing and flap disc sanding for weld prep to attach mounting flanges and gussets so that it could be bolted to the truck frame, but still removable, in case the truck frame is fitted with a different bed down the line.


The item of interest is on the very bottom of the above photo. The other prepped material (triangles and C channel) are for holding the tool boxes that would be in the way of a more normal mounting of the fuel filler.

Even the steel used to make the mounting gussets and brackets was from recycled material. Example:


The slice on the left is a sample of the original condition of the material that the hand cut and drilled bracket on the right was carved from.


Marrying the hand hewn angle iron frame mounting bracket to the basketball hoop tube splice...



The strange angle propping is simply to position as many welds as possible in 1F, since the older I get, the more I seem to take Elvis to heart ("Whole lotta shakin' goin on.") Repositioning any bench work at an angle allows gravity to help out a little bit.

 

​​​​​​Ah man, I washed so many thousands of those in highschool and college. Those pics will probably trigger recurring nightmares of the stacks of them getting dumped at a sink faster than I can scrub them when I finally get to sleep tomorrow morning after work tonight

I applaud your skills tho. You've saved some poor sap the task of washing those ever again, every little bit helps

 

"After work tonight"... you're still washing them? That must have been a pretty tall stack!

I'm now using commercial baking pans... large commercial cookie sheets, made out of sheet aluminum, stiffened by the 3/4" tall lip around the perimeter, and neatly finished with a rolled edge to boot.

The cost to have aluminum sheet fabricated with stiffeners and rolled edges at a metal fabricator is 50 to 100 times what cookie sheets can be purchased for at a commercial restaurant supply. I use them as splash shields and heat shields.

Although, the most recent heat shield I installed over a DPF was actually recycled from a mid century aluminum garden hose holder... you know, the thing that our fathers attached to the side of the house near the hose bib, to coil the garden hose over, in the days before "Plastics". Those old aluminum hose holders have a nice curve to them, stiffening creases, and a 3/8" raised lip at either end (to keep the garden hose from slipping off). Worked beautifully to shield heat from the radio transmitters mounted under the bed.

Nothing is sacred. I even recycle the red caps off of disposable aerosol whip cream dispensers, to use as hot B+ post protectors on electro hydraulic pumps. Everything is a potential truck part.

 

Just working night shifts at the moment. Glad to say I've moved up in the world away from doing dishes. Tho with our family we pile up quite a few after a meal I can't toss the ceramic stuff around like those restaurant pans

 

I used to do KP duty in boot camp, because I refused to Spit Shine my boots.
I told that Staff Sargent, who almost older than me, that the book says, they will be polished, says nothing about Spit Shines which ruins the leather...

I turned 21 the 2nd month of Boot Camp, so I had my brain cells in order, to hell with Ridiculous crap, right??

no thank you, so I go to KP hall... loved it, I'm a Farm Boy and I love Bacon, Eggs, Hashbrowns, Oatmeal cereal .... and can swing a mop with the best of them....

back to the 7-pin issue, as mentioned a post or 20 back, I decided to hook up the Dump Trailer midway to Jorja... and huh?? it works just fine...

so, what the heck is going on here? in my pea brain, as I travel down the sodden trail to Jorja, I begin to remember that the plugin Tester that I was using had Flat Tip connectors, they did not Slide into the truck receptacle quite like it should...

so, I found this one, a for sure nuff hook up style test light, it will be here in a couple days... so let the fun being.