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Today we are going to talk about the two main kinds of brake controllers, the proportional
and the time delay. The two we have here are the Journey HD and the Draw-Tite Activator
II. These are what you call the time delay brake controllers. Basically what happens
is that when you hit the brakes, they come on at a certain speed that you set on the
brake controller. Like on this one here, we have a sync switch here that controls how
fast it comes on and then this *** here controls how much power it takes to stop the trailer.
Basically you hit your foot brake and it comes on at the rate you determine and at how much
power you have set aside for it, and then it stays there until you completely let off
the brake. However, there is not a time delay on these.
These are inertia activated, which means there is basically a little pendulum on the inside
for lack of a better term that just moves forward as soon as you hit your brakes. With
inertia, you know, as soon as you hit your brakes, stuff goes flying forward. With a
little movement in here it does the same thing. The more the movement goes up, the more power
it sends out to the trailer brakes. So once your trailer brakes start activating and your
truck brakes start activating, everything starts slowing down. The pendulum starts coming
back down too, and also it lets off the current going out to the trailer at the same time.
So that way you have a gradual stopping power going with the trailer brakes. It makes the
trailer act as one with the truck, more so than with the time delay units. A couple of
differences about these is basically in how you install these on your vehicle. Whats really
nice about the time delay ones is you can mount them like that, or sideways, or upside
down it does not matter because they are completely solid state no moving parts whatsoever. And
this one, the same way you can mount it on top of the dash, sideways, you can mount it
on the bottom basically anywhere you want, as long as you keep it in easy reach. Now
with the proportional one its a different story. They have a limited amount of angle
that you can install them at. Basically you have about a 70-degree angle up and maybe
a 30-degree angle down. It varies with different brake controllers. I think with the Odyssey
you can probably go up to 90 degrees and it will work just fine. However, you cant really
do any tilting like this, just a little like this, and maybe a hair of an angle like this
from left to right. And you can do that on both of these. But
for
the most part, the closer to level you can keep the proportional ones the better off you are.