kayakrguy wrote:The yellow and green wires are a continuous run from the connector to the tail lights. Both tail lights are grounded to the trailer frame with white wire running to the front where they meet the ground wire from the connector, and are screwed to the tongue frame.
Jim,
Are you
certain that the connector is wired correctly? I've seen some pretty flaky stuff happen when somebody started counting at the wrong end when they were wiring up the contacts in a connector. Open ground leads act especially weird. In that case a trailer might make an intermittent ground connection to the vehicle through the hitch, so sometimes it would act all right and other times it wouldn't.
I have deeply offended Zeus, Poseidon, Athena et al....
With electicity, Murphy outranks them all.
So, if anyone can suggest something to pursue tomorrow by way of analysis, I'm all ears
I'd suggest you get a continuity tester (which is different from a test light -it has a battery in it and will light up if the points it touches are connected electrically) or a multimeter set to measure resistance, and see if these are connected:
1) With the trailer plugged into the vehicle but the hitch detached, make sure there's a connection between the vehicle body ground and the trailer body ground. (Test this with the vehicle turned off.)
2) With the trailer unplugged from the vehicle, check each terminal on the trailer connector and make sure it's connected to the wire coming out of it that it's supposed to be. If I'm reading the drawings I found online correctly, the shrouded contact on your trailer plug is ground and should be connected to the white wire, the contact next to that goes to the brown wire (markers), the one next to that is yellow (left turn), and the last one is green (right turn). (Somebody please correct me if I got that wrong.)
3) If you haven't already, check to make sure your vehicle plug is wired correctly with the trailer disconnected. Use your test light for this, with the vehicle turned on. There's a nice little chart at
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/2358/ ... s/a08.html about 2/3 of the way down the page that shows which wires should light up your test light for left turn, right turn, brake, and tail lights turned on. The paragraph above it says to connect your test light clip to the vehicle frame ground. I think that's a good idea. If you get normal readings, then clip to the white wire (which I believe is the exposed contact on your vehicle plug) and repeat the measurements. If they're different, the vehicle plug wiring is bad.
I know it's a lot of work, but each connection in a circuit doubles the probability of an error and you have a LOT of connections. Also, don't overlook the fact that there may be more than one problem - if you find a problem and fix it, don't assume that's the last one.
Good luck!
Dave
Behind every successful man is a woman who wants a teardrop camper.
by madjack » Thu May 29, 2008 11:07 am 
kind of afternoon. Simply put, nothing went right 
Here's my story.
