Getting the Jeep ready for towing involved setting up a Blue Ox Towing System

Getting Ready:  Towing The Jeep Wrangler Behind The Motorhome

As much as I love my home base in Comox Valley, I’m ready to leave for a few months.  It’s hard to imagine leaving these forested and sandy beaches. But if I’m being honest, I’ve been ready to take off for a few months, but in true boomer fashion, I’ve been waiting for an injury left over from my cycling accident to heal before I take off.  Finally it’s letting me go wandering again!  So this year’s plans are to touch the Eastern shore of Canada, Nova Scotia.  This year, I’m going to tow the Jeep Wrangler I bought for this purpose.  So I’d need to get some sort of  a Jeep Wrangler towing system set up been keeping busy setting everything up.  When you tow any vehicle behind a motorhome, it has to be set up with a bunch of equipment to keep it safe on the road.

Jeep Wrangler Towing System Set Up

I needed to set up the Jeep with:

• A base plate (what the tow bar attaches to)
• A special tow bar
• A brake controller
• A breakaway switch (puts the brakes on the tow vehicle if it detaches from the RV).
• A wiring harness so the Jeep lights do whatever the motorhome lights do.

The little Jeep Wrangler I bought came with an older Blue Ox base plate.   Now I had to get the rest of the gear set up.  The cost of a tow bar and  brake controller is about $4500 in my area.  So I found a used Blue Ox Tow Bar and portable brake controller on Facebook Marketplace and immediately earned the disdain of the RV Tech that I usually use for installations and maintenance.  Especially when I questioned why it would take 12 hours to get the wiring harness on the Jeep.  “Well if you don’t trust me, I’m not installing it for you”   And so, with that, I dodged a bullet.

A Lesson In Self Sufficiency

I booked the only other available RV technician, a guy with a great reputation.  And as a result his great reputation (and the fact that choices are limited here), he was busy!  So busy working crazy hours, that he couldn’t spend time doing things that he loved.  He wound up retiring before our appointment.  So, I found a young guy to install a wiring harness on the Jeep.  After he installed it I realized I’d need an adapter- not hard to find (famous last words).  So off I went to the bustle of the Canadian Tire in Courtenay.  And Lordco and NAPA too.  No one had the adapter I needed.  I wound up ordering some wireless magnetic LED lights which would arrive faster than the adapter would.  They turned out to be a brilliant solution.

I still had to get the Blue Ox breakaway switch installed.  One local RV dealer’s service department assured me “You don’t need a breakaway switch on your toad- we’ve never heard of doing that before”.   The law in BC is that you have to have one on vehicles over 4000 lbs.  The  little Jeep Wrangler is close enough to that.  And besides, I love my Jeep-if it ever broke free of my motorhome on some highway, I’d sure want it to stop instead of rolling into a highway barrier (or traffic).  The breakaway switch would put the brakes on if the Jeep detached from the motorhome. So then I knew I was on my own setting up the breakaway switch.  Could I do it?

As it turned out the breakaway switch was an easy and quick install on the Jeep.  And I would soon be rolling East.