No brakes on trailer

Gdetrailer wrote:

cummins2014 wrote:

Its been awhile since I have wired brakes on a trailer I've built. The one I did had tandem axles , it was an ATV trailer ,and I only bought one axle with brakes ,and the other without. I jumped one wire across to the other side ,and ran the blue wire to the plug, and I ran the other two coming off the brakes to ground on the frame each side. Plus when I ran the rest of the wires I also ran a ground wire to the frame coming off the plug. My question ,and I have to assume those brakes don't work if Their ground wires are broke or loose ,and not grounding . AlthoughI have wired a separate ground to the trailer from the plug ??

Granted, adding a ground wire at the axles can work, it was not recommended practice by Dexter Axle..

Dexter used to have a real good axle installation manual online that went into a lot of detail on the hows and whys to wire the brakes properly.. Looks like they removed that document from their library..

In a nutshell, by adding individual grounds in different places it is possible to get varying qualities in those different grounds, that is due to connection resistance, differences of resistance of the steel in the frame (and yes, steel has a much higher resistance than copper), electrical connections of the frame members..

In theory one can use the frame as a grounding point but in the real world what typically happens is slight differences in the electrical connections and those differences can be enough to affect how strong each magnet will be, some may be stronger than others which means the brakes are not in sync..

Trust me, you do not want brakes on one side of your trailer acting stronger than the other side.. It WILL pull you off the road or even worse pulling you into oncoming traffic.

By making a "home run" where ALL the brake magnets terminate to ground at the same spot, you now eliminate the off chance of having slight variations of magnet strength caused by a non common grounding point.

Additionally, on newer brake controllers, individual grounds CAN cause intermittent controller shut down.. They are that sensitive..

The fact that every trailer with factory electric brakes that I have owned came factory with all the brake magnets grounding done at the tongue should also speak volumes to the importance of this detail..

RV manufacturers are cheapskates, they won't spend a penny more than they need to.. If a single ground wire was not needed for proper operation, then they would not have spent the money on running one for the brakes to the tongue.. Would save them $10 per trailer and if they build 10,000 trailers that is $100,000 in savings they can pocket per yr..

I am going by memory, the ATV trailer is not here right now, or I would look to see what I did . Now that you mention ,I could of connected the two ground wires in the same place, ran them together, I had to on the blue wire up to the plug.

Being an ATV trailer that weighs around 1200 lbs, it brakes well. It requires my brake controller on my Ram truck to be turned way down ,or they lock up .

Is it possible for the grounding on the brakes on this trailer the OP has to be faulty, letting the lights work, being on a different ground ???