etrailer | DIY Install: Blue Ox Patriot Portable Flat Tow Brake System on your 2018 Jeep JK Wrangler

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Hello neighbors, it's Brad here at etrailer and today we're taking a look at installing the Blue Ox Braking System, on a 2018 Jeep Wrangler JK. Now when it comes to flat towing any vehicle, there's gonna be five main components that are gonna be required and these are just the basics that you'll have to have. There's gonna be a few other things that you may need to add independent on your vehicle, and some of those auxiliary things would be a stoplight switch, a charge line, a high low adapter. On our case, a 12 volt outlet kit for the portable braking system. But the main basics that you're gonna want to focus on first are gonna be the base plate, which is gonna attach to the frame of the vehicle and create the structural mounting point for all of your components to go on and safely tow the vehicle down the road. The connection point between your base plate and the hitch on the RV is your tow bar.
And the tow bar again is just that connection point. But we also have safety cables, which are just like towing a trailer. You would have your safety chains. These are there just in case of a disconnect, if you forget to hook any of this up, it's still gonna keep the vehicle attached. You also have diode wiring, which will transmit the light signals from the RV to the towed vehicle.
So that's gonna be your running lights, your brake lights, as well as your turn signals. And in some cases, some of your braking systems, like the Stay and Play Duo require the diode wiring to be tapped into to get the signal to start braking. We also have our braking system, which today we have a Blue Ox Patriot portable system, but all of them are gonna have a breakaway switch and that's in case of everything failing. This will pull and put the brakes on the vehicle, that way it's not rolling down the highway. Now a braking system is going to be a required component of flat towing a vehicle, and there's a lot of different options out there.
It really breaks down into two different buckets and one of them's gonna be a fixed system, which attaches to the vehicle, ties into a lot of times your air lines and then has a physical mount on the firewall to apply the pressure on the brake pedal. Your other alternative is going to be a portable system and this is one of my favorites, this is the Blue Ox Patriot. It's a really great option and it really comes down to this is super easy to get installed. So if you're worried about installing a fixed system, I get it, it seems a little bit, there's a lot to it or, and you maybe not want to have to pay someone labor-wise to do that. This is something you can do yourself.
It is pretty easy to do. And what it comes down to is it's super easy setup. I also like the digital display that you're gonna be using for manual braking, any adjustments that goes in the RV so you can adjust that on the fly from the dash of your vehicle, which I think is really cool. Now that's not to say that portable systems don't have drawbacks and the drawbacks really just come down to when you're not flat towing your vehicle, where do you store this But that's kind of a minor thing and so if you're just kind of a casual flat tower, awesome option, and also if you plan on changing your towed vehicle later down, you can take this from one vehicle to the other, whereas a fixed system you can, it's just a little bit more uninstalling that you'll have to do. So this definitely becomes a great option for a lot of you out there that just want that braking system to be safe and legal but also nice and easy to use. The basic concept of setting this up really comes down to once you get it dialed in and it's working, you should be able to keep the feet kind of in the same position so it'll make it a little bit easier. But this will clamp around the brake pedal and it's gonna actuate whether you are manually depressing the button. It's very much like a brake controller, so you can have that manual override or it's gonna use an inertia sensor to when this is kind of feeling that stopping happening with the RV, it's gonna apply it, it is a little bit delayed and that's not a problem because just like a brake controller, you don't always want that coming on very hard. Sometimes as you're starting to really slow into it, that's when you want it to gradually go on and a hard panic stop as well. It's gonna come on just as hard as you break. It's just slightly delayed, which does save it from constantly actuating when it really doesn't need to. So the way this works, this is