Relocate and Protect Trailer Harness

Like many people, my trailer wiring harness was destroyed because it is located in a very vulnerable place below the frame. My first attempt at a solution was to bend the bracket back so that the plug face was pointing straight down. However, even that resulted in the plug being completely destroyed. When I replaced my rear bumper, I decided that I was going to relocate a new plug to on top of the frame. Note, you don't have to remove your bumper to do this job and I actually didn't finish this until well after the new bumper was already installed.

Broken plug and new mounting location.

I bought a new Hoplins trailer wiring harness from Autozone. One thing to note is that the gauge of two of the wires are thicker than the stock Tacoma wires so you will need to use the larger butt clips to connect them. Also, the wiring diagram with the Hopkins harness does not match the Tacoma. My son and I matched up the wires using the Tacoma wiring guide and used a multi-meter to verify the signals were correct prior to crimping any butt connectors.

Once the wiring was done, we used epoxy to attach the plug mount to the frame after cleaning both. We decided to go this route because the force on the plug is going to be very low and there was no need to drill or tap holes into the frame. We used a clamp to hold everything in place for about 30 minutes until set. The epoxy will cure in about 24 hours.

After that, it is just wire management. Since the butt clips were not heat shrink clips, we used liquid electrical tape to fully seal all connections. Then zip tied the cables to secure them.

Now we can still use our trailer plug and it is protected by the frame of the truck.

I'm still not satisfied with the job I did with the liquid electrical tape and I'm going to it it again and I think wrap the hole mess in heat shrink and then seal again with spray flex-seal.