Trailer electrical connector maintenance.

[Tacyon]

I have to pick up a U-Haul trailer this evening and decided to do a quick maintenance check on the Edge's trailer light plug. Good thing I did as it wouldn't have worked had I not serviced it first. I didn't take a before pic, sry. But trust me, it wasn't pretty.

 

Here's what I did, took about 10 minutes and it's better than new.

 

1) a can of spray electrical contact cleaner. I had a can of CRC Cleaner and it worked great.

2) a small, short strip of fine grit sandpaper. Doesn't have to be much, ~1/4" x 1" long.

3) a small cotter pin. (had several in my tool box) small enough to easily fit inside the connector jacks. Mine only filled about 70% of diameter of the jack in the rubber connector.

4) take the sandpaper and place its short edge in the open end of the cotter pin, like a tiny flag. Then spin the cotter pin wrapping the sandpaper around it.

 

 

5) spray some cleaner in the jacks and insert this cleaner wand like this and spin around.

 

 

6) Once clean and looking shiny, flush with more spray cleaner and inspect.

7) Use some dielectric grease (I had a tube of permatex dielectric grease) and use the same cotter pin to push the grease into the now clean jacks.

 

 

8) and finally, place a lil dab of dielectric grease on the tip of your finger and smooch around inside the lid of the cover that snaps back over this to keep water and other debris out of.

 

So, looks like I've created an 8 step program to get clean and conductive!

 

Thus endeth the lesson

 

[enigma-2]

Good advice. Now it makes me want to check mine.