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Hey guys, it's Nick from F150LEDs.com. Today we're here with our '17 Ford F-150 Raptor and we're going to be showing you how to turn your intake space into something awesome that's going to help your Raptor stand out and shine brighter during day and night by using our Paladin 90-watt CREE LED bars here. You can do a two bar option as you see here, or you can do a single bar option that's going to be in the center and we're going to show you how to install both right now.
The first thing we need to do is remove this lower intake cover. To do that, we're going to take our pry tool, if you've got a flat-head screwdriver or something like that, that works great. Now the first time you take this cover off, it's going to require a little force, a little pry force. We've had ours off several times now for several different installs, so it's going to come off much easier. If you just pry down the grill cover, there's going to be four tabs, two here at the top, two at the bottom, same thing here to the top to the bottom and two here at the top and two of them bottom... And that's all there is to it. Now we'll have access to our lower intake area for our bars.
First, let's go ahead and show you how to install the single bar setup and then we'll show you how to install the double bar setup. So if we're going to go with a single bar, obviously we're going to want it centered here and there's a protruding tab on your passenger side. Just set the bar behind it and then bring your bar in. So we're going to want it centered up just like that. But in order to get our bar here, we need something to bolt it to. So take your bar back off, and then we're going to use these custom L-brackets here and we're going to mount that bracket like this, so you're going to position that small piece here at the very top of this opening.
And then one half inch back from the tab that's here where my finger is, kind of hard to show on the video, you're going to want to mark the spot and use a 5/16th drill bit to just drill this hard plastic box here, so we've got somewhere to mount our bar. So your bracket is going to be like this, our bar's going to go in and then you'll bolt it from this opening here. So as you can see, we've already got our drilled out spot here, so we're ready to put our bracket up against it. And then we'll put our bar here and from this side we'll bolt into place. So when we're doing the double bar install method, there is one modification to this grill cover that we're going to have to make, and that involves trimming off some of these rear tabs, protruding tabs on the back. That's because the LED bars now occupy the space that these would penetrate. So we're just going to take our Dremel but you can use a hacksaw or something like that, just to easily take these tabs off the back of this cover here...
So that's all there is to removing the tab. Now we're going to repeat for these other three tabs as well. The first thing we need to do when installing our double bar setup here in our intake is to make some mounting holes. So what we're going to do is just take a couple of quick measurements and then we're going to mark with our Sharpie and then we're just going to drill this hard plastic intake box out using a 5/16th drill bit. Now we've already made our holes, but we're going to just go ahead and walk through the process. So you're going to come over one inch from this protrusion, this metal protrusion here, so one inch over, and that's going to be your center line for your mounting hole, and then two inches, two inches from the bottom. So as you see there's a hole here.
It's exactly two inches from the bottom and then one inch from this tab here, is going to be your center of your hole. So that's one 5/16th drill hole that you make there. And then from the top, you one inch in, and then you're going to do one and a half inches from the top. So from on the bottom, you come two inches up and from the top, you come one and half inches down, and it's one inch from this line. And then that's your two holes and you use a 5/16th drill bit to drill those out. Let's take a quick second to talk about the F-150LEDs custom harness. So if you've got the single bar set up, you're going to have the single braid harness with a connector for one light. And the only difference, if you order the dual light kit, is that this harness has two light connection points.
So you still only have to run one harness, but it can power both lights simultaneously. So when we're talking about our braid, you'll notice right off the bat that it's got a heavy duty heat resistant tear resistant braiding across all of your heavy cabling here. It's got a built in inline fuse protector, these are your positive and ground terminals. These are going to connect right onto your battery terminals. It's going to power the kit. This is your relay, it doesn't have to be installed anywhere specifically just somewhere tucked up, safe, out of the way. You can use a zip tie for that. And then for the Raptors, specifically, we've got this blue wire on these harnesses and we're going to use a quick splice connector to connect this directly to your aux, which the Raptor comes equipped with. So it makes it really easy to basically have a switch right there for your lights and you don't have to run any accessory switches into the cab.
A convenient way found to run your harness into your intake area is above your skid plate underneath the engine bay of the truck and then running it directly up into the engine bay cabin. We can connect our harness by connecting our blue wire here to the aux switch connectors located on the passenger side, under your hood. There are multiple color wires, we're going to be using the purple and orange wire and wiring up our intake bars to the aux 2 switch. All right, so what we're going to be using is this quick splice connector. The quick splice connector allows you to run your wires through its two channels, one on the inside, and then one on the outside channel just like so. And then take a wrench or some pliers and apply pressure down on top of this metal tab, which connects the two wires.
So our harness is now connected to the aux 2 switch inside our Raptor. To clarify the colors, if you wanted to use a different aux switch, you can reference the manual for your Raptor. Now that we've got our IP68 connectors run into the intake box, let's go ahead and make the connection with the bar... You'll notice that there's a notch here to align your positive and negative poles up, bring your locking ring collar over and tighten it all the way. This is going to give you that IP68 weatherproof full protection seal. We're going to go ahead and set this bar in place and then we will connect our second bar... So your bar is going to be resting right behind these two tabs and right on top of these protrusions here... Okay, that's good. Now we'll grab our other bar, do the same for it, connect our IP68 connector here, tighten the lock ring all the way...
And just like the bottom bar, it lines up right behind these tabs here... Okay, and now we'll be able to push these connectors here behind the bars and by pulling on our harness, we'll be able to remove this extra harness inside the intake box because you don't want it... you want to make sure it's not in a place where it can interfere with your vent system here in the rear. And then we'll go ahead and tighten our bolts from the sides and be done.
If you're looking for a great way for your Raptor to stand out and shine brighter, then these Paladin Series LED Bars are a great way to do it. The installation is quick and easy and it makes an immediate impact. The camera can't capture how bright these are, but they definitely are going to light up the night in front of you and your truck looks great with them on. We highly recommend them. You can check them out at F150LEDs.com, where you'll find all of our great custom LED lighting products for your Ford F-150 Raptor. Be sure to check us out on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel 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 soon. Thanks guys.
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