Billet Aluminum Competition Kill Switch

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. I'm Jason Wehrli with Big Hitch Products, and today, we have our billet safety kill switch.
This product was specifically designed around truck and tractor pulling, but it could be used for something else if you have a performance or a race application.
So in the sport of truck and tractor pulling, if you're getting out of hand, going out of bounds or if there's a sled malfunction, the sled operator can shut down your vehicle by way of activating, in most cases a high-speed winch or some pull cable that is directly connected to this ring here. And this switch is a safety device mounted on your vehicle that in most cases will control something electronic, whether it be your ECM, your fuel pump, or some other sort of safety on-off switch. You can use it to break ground or break power to a relay.
So what we've got is a nice heavy-duty billet aluminum housing. On the bottom side, we've got two tapped holes so that you can mount this block - typically needs to be mounted in the center of the vehicle within so much distance from the rear around the hitch area near your sled stops tailgate near a truck or somewhere on your roll bar on a tractor.
So on the bottom side we've got the threaded mount point for you BHP logo on the top. And then on the side we have the threaded port for a standard neutral safety switch, reverse light switch, whatever you want to consider. This is a normally open style switch so when the ball is out, it is open and as it gets pressed in, it closes the circuit creating full circuit, whether it be for your ground system or a hot wire on a relay. So as the pin is installed, we have a nice O-ring in the end of the pin to help it stay seated inside of the block itself. And then a small groove at the back. That groove
Is right where that ball resides when it's threaded into the housing. So when the pin's installed, that ball is pressed in and creates your closed circuit to complete your ground wire or power hot wire. And as the pin is removed, in the case of a safety situation, that ball is then extended back out and breaks that circuit. We include a nice pigtail, a nice feature that many other safety kill switches on the market don't include. They send you a kill switch, and you have to come up with the right adapter, source it from wherever, and get five different returns from a local hardware store before you get what you need. So we opted to include a nice weather pack style connector on the end of that switch, ready to be wired into whatever accessory you're controlling. And it is a nice serviceable item available from any hardware store or local auto parts store if you ever needed to replace it.
A pretty low cost piece. Actual housing itself made a billet aluminum. We've got a nice two inch diameter ring here, which is most pulling organizations require as a minimum size for the safety ring work one quarter by five sixteenths in thickness on the diameter here. So it doesn't take a ton of attention to pull it out, but you got a nice strong cross-section there so that any pull device on it so can yank that switch out in case of a failure or a shutdown. Another nice feature that we've incorporated into the kill switch that we've got a lot of questions about that some people may not notice. It's not always club specific, but most clubs require it is during the teching process of the vehicle to know that the safety kill switch on the vehicle was teched, they'll often install a specific color or some device that organization uses.
Usually a zip tie of a specific color they'll install on your safety kill switch, showing that that vehicle has been tech inspected and that the kill switch operates as it's supposed to. So we include a hole here on the side of the housing that allows you to install that safety organization's preferred color zip tie through the housing and the hook. This is a nice little feature that is often overlooked on safety kill switches. At the end of the day, it's a pin going into housing, and you're relying on the pressure of the ball’s spring and this O-ring to hold it in place. Over time, things can get lose. It's been in and out many times; they can become easy to pull out. The last thing you want is for your safety switch to become disconnected during a pull when it wasn't meant to be and have you shut down for no reason.
Even if your pulling organization does not require a zip tie to be here, it's always good practice to have a zip tie on this to make sure that that kill switch can't be easily pulled from the housing. What we've seen happen over the years is the person hooking up the sled to the vehicle; maybe the cable connected to this gets wrapped around the chain or caught up on something. You don't want this pin to be able to slide out effortlessly. You want to have some force to pull this pin out, and you’re thinking, oh well, if a zip tie has to get broken for it to pull out. Well, as I mentioned earlier, nearly all sleds out there, they're using a high-speed winch of some sort or pull device to pull this cable out, and any one of those devices that's on the sled is going to overcome the braking strength of the zip tie, no problem.
So, the zip tie is a very nice safety feature to ensure that this pin doesn't accidentally work its way out or have a small trip that causes it to kill the vehicle when it wasn't meant to be killed. But if it does need to be killed, anything that's going to be pulling on it, the cable, the winch is going to break that zip tie no problem. So that is a nice feature we added to the switch that we did not used to have, and when we redesigned it, we decided to include it. So overall it's a really simple basic device, again, designed around the truck and tractor pull as a universal component, not model specific here, bolt on any mount bracket, anywhere on your roll cage or chassis, and pretty adaptable to any wire harness with seal type connectors.
But that about wraps up all the BHP billet kill switch features. If you have any other questions about our BHP polling products, WC FAB offers, or the truck and tractor-pulling world, feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to our sales team. Thanks a lot for watching.