2017 - 2022 F250 Super Duty PALADIN 210W Curved CREE XTE LED Bumper Bar

Hey guys. This is Nick from F150LEDs.com. Today we are here with our 2017 Ford F250 series truck. I'm going to be showing you how to install our 210 watt CREE XTE Paladin Series LED Bar here, flush-mounted, right below the grill and right above the bumper here. This is going to be an extremely bright bar. Definitely going to be an improvement to your F250 experience. And even when the light's off, it gives the truck and aggressive, awesome looking appearance. So the installation's easy. I'm going to show you how it's done right now.

The first thing we need to do is mount our side brackets to the LED bar itself. Take your Torx 40 bolt, and then a lock washer, slide it and then a flat washer, and then we're going to insert it into our bracket, like so, making sure that our mounting tab is pointed away from the bar. Then I'm just going to go and hand tighten it here. Make sure we don't cross thread any threads. And then take the included Torx wrench here. We're going to tighten to about 80% to give us a little bit of flexibility until our install is complete. Okay. A little more.

Okay. And now we'll repeat for the other side. So let's go ahead and position the bar onto the bumper and since we're flush mounting it right under this grill. So I'm going to go ahead and run our heavy duty IP68 connector behind the grill there to that center opening, feed some excess harness wire through there, and now I'm going to set the bar right onto the bumper. And I'm going to center it up so you're going to want to count 16. So the 16th bolt here on the front of the LED bar is going to be center. So I'm going to center that up with my Ford emblem and my two little columns here in the grill. And then I'm just going to push back. Like so. Okay. So now we've got it centered and we've got it recessed up under the grill here.

The next thing you want to do is just make sure that the left or the right side isn't further out. You want to make sure that those are even. They look good. Okay. So now that we've got our bar in place, this is where we're going to install it. Go ahead and take a Sharpie, and then I'm just going to go ahead and mark these openings where our bracket opening is. Like so. Okay. One thing you'll notice is the bracket doesn't conform 100% to the bumper, but that's perfectly fine. And then once we drop our bolt and tighten it, it's going to make an excellent fit onto the bumper. Okay?

All right. So now that we've made our marks, we're going to take our bar off, and we'll quickly drill those two holes, and then we'll put the bar back on and mount it into place. Now we just need to take a 5/16 drill bit and drill out the markings we just made so that we can drop the bolt in and secure the bar to the bumper. Now, the metal is thin here and it drills out really easy so I wouldn't let this step worry you about the difficulty of drilling this.

Now we need to, once again, reposition our bar onto the bumper, like we did earlier, and then take the included bolts, and we're just going to drop them down through our bracket. Put a flat washer. Then we're going to drop it through the bracket, through the hole we just drilled. Make sure everything's still straight and correct. Now get your bar repositioned back on your bumper and then we're going to use the two bolts with the lock washer and a washer. We're going to drop them right through our brackets and the holes we just drilled into the bumper.

Now, I don't know if you can see it on the video or not, but we actually have two holes here, as well, and that's for the Ford mounting option of this bar if you're not doing the flush mount. But that'd be in the PDF guide that you can check out later. But, for now, we've got our bolts dropped in here for our flush mount and we just need to add the nuts on the underside of our bumper. And, to make it easier, you can pull this plastic covering off here. It pops right off. And then we'll be able to run our nut here from underneath…kind of arch your fingers a little bit.

And then we're just going to hand tighten this. And then we're going to do the same for the other side. Like so. Now, once we've got this hand tightened, we want to make sure that the bar is exactly where we want it as far as aim and angle, because we still have a little bit of play, and then we're going to have come back with a wrench to tighten this all the way. Okay. Once you've got your bolts hand tightened, as tight as you can get them, we can go and pop our covers back in place and use a size 10 millimeter wrench to tighten the bolts down. We'll repeat this process for both sides.

Now that we've got our bar securely installed to the truck, all that's left is for us to secure our wiring harness. So the first thing we're going to do is take our IP68 light bar connector side, and we're going to run it right down an open space here, right behind the headlight and the grill. Okay. So we're just going to take this run, and we're going to thread it down where it's coming out the bottom of the engine bay. And that'll give us enough slack to now connect to our LED bar.

All right, so reach under and take the run that you've just run down through the engine bay and then we're going to take our LED bar side connector here, and we're going to connect these together. Now, obviously, there's a lot of different routes and methods that you can use for running your wire, whether it's up through the grill itself, or what we actually ended up doing right here in this install was just bringing our LED bar connector right down behind the bumper. And we actually aren't going to go through the grill on this. So that's up to you. What you think's best. But we're going to take our IP68 heavy duty connectors here, make sure that we line up this notch and then it slides fully into place. Then we're going to bring our lock ring collar, compression collar here, over it and tighten it completely. This is going to make sure that we've got a fully waterproof connection.

Okay. Now we can move from here. We're going to drop any extra harness that we've got and then we're going to make a connection at our battery. Next let's use a 10 millimeter socket or wrench and we're going to connect our red positive terminal ring to this battery terminal. Like so. Make sure it's snug. That you got a good connection. Now connect to the black ground ring terminal to the bolt shown here.

Now that our harness is hooked up for power, all that's left is connecting to our switch. Now, obviously, the 17 and up F250s have upfitter switches so we're going to be utilizing those. But, if you're taking advantage of the F150LED's wireless harness adapter, now would be the time to use it. And again, this adapter, if you plug it in here, will allow you to control this bar wirelessly with its own separate remote. So you can turn it on. You can turn off. There's also a flash mode and a hyper flash mode that that remote enables you to do.

So we're going to be using it. So we're going to go and hook it up to this side. So this is your harness, and now hook it up to the wireless adapter, and now we're going to be taking our upfitter switch connection, which is this blue wire connected to the tab here, we're going to connect it to the other side of our wireless adaptor. If you're not using the wireless adapter, this plug will just plug right into your harness. And that's all there is to that. Okay?

So now your upfitter switch wires are going to be located right behind this fuse panel box right here on the driver's side. Sometimes it can help to take the cover off just to gain access to them. If you haven't used them, usually they come from the factory zip-tied together and it makes it a lot easier if you just go ahead and cut that zip tie. And there's a ... should be a label, like this, that tells you which switch goes to which color combination. So we're going to be using the relay switch one. So that's going to be brown and green, which is going to be this wire here.

So what we're going to do, we're going to take our blue wire and we're going to spin it up a little bit. It just makes it a little easier for when we use our quick splice easy connector. Now these are very easy to use. You can watch the use the card above. It's going to have a link to how to use these. Extremely easy. So grab the wire that we want to use. We're going to wrap our wire or push our wire, I should say, into this red connector from the side. Just like so.

Now we're going to feed our blue wire into the open channel. It backs out here. Make sure it goes all the way in past the metal connector. That's where having ... spinning it tight can help. Now to connect our blue side, just go ahead and fold it over in half, like so, and we're just going to do a twist on it just to give it a little more depth. Thickness. Just helps a little bit on the connection. It's not necessary, but it helps on the easy quick splice connector here.

So now we're going to plug that in. Make sure it goes all the way to the back of the channel. Like so. And now we're going to clamp on. You just be pushing that metal tab down and that's going to connect our wires. Like so. And you can close the clamp. All right. So now we've got our complete harness hooked up. The bar can be controlled through the aux switch one because that's the wire we use or through our F150LED's remote system.

So that's all there is to installing our 210 CREE XTE Paladin Series LED Bar here on the front of your 2017 Ford F250 series truck. It's extremely easy to install, and the camera can't capture it, but this thing puts off a lot of light. We guarantee that you're going to be happy and satisfied with it, for sure. You can check it out at F150LEDs.com, where you can find all of our custom LED products built specifically for your Ford F150, F250 and Super Duty trucks. We truly appreciate your support and look forward to seeing you there. Thanks guys.