As Harvest gets closer I needed to fix our Trailer. During Harvest we use our flatbed trailed to haul the grapes to the winery. The trailer is in good shape I replaced the deck boards last year. But unfortunately the last time I used it the lights on one side did not work.
The first thing that I did was look at the connector that plugs into the truck. I was planning on replacing this anyway because we needed an adapter to go from this older style connector to the newer style in the truck. When I pulled the connector I found this. I thought that this may be my problem. But I was to find out that it was much worse than than I thought.
After cutting back the wires to get some fresh wire I decided to tin the wires with Solder to give them a little protection and make it easier to insert them into the new connector.
Once the wires were tinned I used a car battery to test all the connections. This is when I realized that things were worse off than I thought. Most of the lights still did not work.
So I proceeded to install the connector before I tracked down the rest of the wiring problems.
Once I got the new connector on I climbed under the trailer and started to chase the wires. What I found surprised me. The wires were not broken they were gone! A rat had decided to eat large chunks of the wire, copper and all. Here is a picture of three of the connections that plug into the running lights in the back before (eaten to nothing) and the new wires that I bought and started soldering in place.
Almost all of the lights at the back of the trailer looked like this, so after several hours of rewiring I finally have the trailer ready to deliver grapes. Sorry I did not take any pictures under the trailer, I was too busy cussing the rats!
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