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Hey guys, it's Nick from F150LEDs.com. Today we're here to show you how to stand out and shine brighter with your ‘17 and up Ford F-150 series Raptor by installing our CREE XTE Paladin Series LED Bar here on the front bumper. All right. These bars are equipped with our five watt XTE CREE variant LEDs, which are extremely efficient and extremely bright. We've got them encased in our curb die cast aluminum blacked out housing here. Looks fantastic along with our blacked out hardware here when mounted on the Raptor. With our custom spot optics combined with this slight curvature here in the bar, you're going to get a fantastic light output both distance as well as a wide beam pattern. Okay. You're not going to have the pencil affect. We know you're going to love this bar on your Raptor. The install is extremely easy and we're going to show you how it's done right now.
The first thing that we need to do is simply attach these custom L-shaped brackets to both ends of the bar. Now, go ahead and place the bar directly on top of the bumper exactly where you want it. It helps to have a friend hold it in place, but you're going to take some electrical tape or some similar marking tape, and you're going to just going to mark this left side of the bracket here and the front side of the bracket, forming a 90 degree angle here at the corner of this tape on the inside. Mark both sides and then we'll be able to install the brackets.
Now take the custom brackets off the bar, set them back on the bumper directly where you've got it marked out here with your 90 degree L, and mark this center-most hole. Now drill out your marking using a 516th drill bit. Don't worry, this bumper is very easy to drill into.
Go ahead and set your brackets on top of the bumper and put the longer bolts through them just to set them in place. In order to tighten these brackets down, we're going to need to get access underneath, so we're going to need to remove this plastic vent cover here. It's extremely easy to do. There's a lot of push pin tabs here at the top and the bottom.
After you do it the first time, it gets a lot easier. But basically, you just want to kind of pry your way around this bottom plastic vent cover again and it just kind of pops off. Again, we've had ours off a few times so it's going to be a little bit easier. Let's see if we can get under it. You use something like a flat head screwdriver if you don't have a fry tool. It'll work just as fine. Let's see, work this way. There we go.
All right, so you can set that aside and this is going to give us access underneath both brackets so we can take our lock washers and bolts and tighten these brackets down. And then we'll be ready to mount our bar to the bumper.
With our lower intake cover re-installed and our brackets fully tightened to the bumper, now we can install our LED bar to the brackets with our short black bolts and lock washers. With our bar solidly here in place on the bumper, now it's time to get our wiring already for hookup. Let's go ahead and take our round IP68 heavy duty connector here. We're going to run right through this gap. It's pretty tight, but you can lift up on this little plastic in here and it slides right in. After we run that through the bottom, we're going to run the harness down through the top and make the connection.
We run our harness down from the top of the engine bay here and this is our LED bar connector. What you need to do is just line up the two poles. The LED bar side is the male side, and the harness side is this female connector side. Take note, there's a notch here in the top of our heavy duty connectors, so you line that up, press firmly in, all the way, and then bring this lock ring collar over the connection and tighten it down. This is going to give us a waterproof, fully sealed, connection from our harness to our LED bar.
Okay. The last thing that we've got to do is finish hooking up our harness here to the battery and to the auxiliary switch hookup here inside the engine bay of the truck. All you need to do is remove the two terminal posts here, the ground posts, and the positive post here on the battery. And obviously the corresponding, the black, goes to the ground and this red wire goes to your positive terminal and then you just reinstall those nuts. That's all there is to hooking up power to your battery. And for your auxiliary switch, all you have to do is use our quick splice tie-in connector with this blue wire. And we're going to use the auxiliary port number one first switch, because the first two switches on your Raptor or your higher amp switches. It's actually, on this ‘17, a green blue wire.
The wire colors are in your user manual. So depending on your model year, it could possibly change color. So just reference that manual. We're just going to take our quick splice connector, which is just like this, and we're going to slide the open side over the auxiliary switch connector, and then we'll slide this blue wire here right in here, right in the open hole, and then push down on this metal tab. And after we've got our ground positive and hook up to our auxiliary switch, we can now test our bar.
That's all there is to installing our Paladin Series CREE XTE LED Bar here on the ‘17 and up Ford F-150 Raptor. Extremely easy. It looks fantastic and it's going to light up everything in your path. We highly recommend this for your Raptor. You can check us out at F150LEDs.com. Be sure to click the subscribe button below to stay up-to-date with the latest and greatest LED products for your Ford F-150. We truly appreciate your support and look forward to seeing you at F-150LEDs.com. Thanks guys.