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Hey guys, it's Nick from F150LEDs.com. Today we're here with our 2018 Ford F-150. We're going to be showing you how to install our Paladin Series LED Bar here directly onto the bumper. These bars are equipped with CREE five-watt XTE LEDs which are extremely bright, and they're also coupled with the custom Paladin optics. Which not only gives you a distance beam but also widens the pattern so you can see far and wide.
These bars look great on the truck. They perform excellent, their IP68 waterproof, weatherproof, built to the highest of standards, and the install is very easy and we're going to show you how it's done right now.
The first thing that you want to do is go ahead and mount our custom L brackets. Notice that the long side is coming up under the bar. Now, go ahead and position that bar directly on top of your bumper, center it up with your Ford emblem, and once you're happy with its position, just take some black electrical tape and mark directly underneath and to the side of where your brackets are located on both sides.
Now we've got our brackets positioning outlined, now we can move on to mounting it to this valance. Now that we've got our bracket locations marked, we also need to mark our drill point into this bumper valance. Add one more piece of tape here, right above your bottom bracket line. Take your bracket, line it up with your bottom piece of tape and the tape on the side, and then mark the inner most circle here. That's going to be your drill point into this valance. Go ahead and do that on both sides and then we'll be ready to remove this valance and mount your bar.
Removing this valance piece is extremely easy. Basically, you remove two bolts located here in the wheel-well on both sides, and then it's just a matter of pulling away. Take a 9/32nd socket, remove these two bolts, and we'll be able to pull the fender away. It's got some pop tabs. Just be gentle with how much pressure you apply, but as you can see it just starts to pop off all the way. Now we're going to go on the other side, remove those two bolts and continue to remove this valance.
Now that we've got our bolts removed on both sides and we've pulled out the sides, just pull directly out from the truck and this entire valance this piece will come off. Now that we've got our valance off the truck, we need to mount our custom brackets directly to this valance so that we can mount the bar.
Taking your drill point here that you marked earlier, we're just going to drill right through this bumper. It's very easy to drill through, don't let that intimidate you. We're going to be using a 7/32nd drill bit. Let it go right through and then we'll be able to drop our bolt right through the top like so with a lock washer on top of this valance, followed by our washer, a lock washer, and the nut. Okay, and then we'll do that for both sides.
Let's go ahead and take our drill and go right on our marked hole. Now go ahead and remove your positioning tape on both sides. We will be able to know. Be sure to mount it on the inner most hole being this taller side of the bottom here. You're going to use this hole here and making sure that your larger diameter hole is vertical because that's what your led bar is going to be mounted to.
Go ahead and take your nut. I meant, excuse me, your bolt, and then you'll take your lock washer and then drop it in. Put it right through the hole we just drilled, and then we're going to come underneath it with our flat washer, lock washer, and then the nut. Then we'll repeat this for the other side. Now that we've got our brackets hand tightened to this valance, let's go ahead and directly mount our led bar. Making sure that your wiring harness is on the driver's side. Go ahead and pull up the bar and just take the larger bolts, hand thread them on each side, like so. Then on this side. Okay.
Now, we're not going to tighten these bolts 100% because once you get it on the truck, you may want to adjust the angle of the bar based on if you've got a lift or what size tires you have and that kind of thing. Just go head and hand tighten it so it's not flopping around. Now that we've got our brackets secured to the bar itself, let's go ahead and before we remount this valance, we're going to use our wrenches and make sure that these bracket bolts underneath the valance are as tight as possible.
Once we get that done, we're ready to remount the valance to the truck. With our bar now mounted directly to the valance, we can just push our valance back into place. Being careful to go ahead and pull your tabs in on the sides of the truck.
If you meet resistance don't try and force it, all right. Just work your way from the center to the outside. There we go. Now, we'll go ahead and re tighten our bolts on the sides of the truck and then we'll reposition our led bar and tighten our side bolts all the way down.
Now that we've got our bar fully installed and looking great, we need to run our harness to our battery and our switch into our cab. The first step in doing that is taking our IP68 heavy duty connector here and we're going to run it behind the grill and up into the cab right here.
Just run it into the cab and just work with your fingers to grab through it and just work your way up. You can use some pliers depending on some grills are easier and some grills are harder to get this through. Go ahead and feed all your wire in. You want to make sure that you don't have extra wiring hanging out when you finish here because of the vent system. You don't want to interfere with your blades when they open and close. Okay.
This point, it's typically easier for me to grab some pliers. I got it this time, but if you're having any trouble getting it, you can use some needle nose pliers and just pull it right through. Go ahead and pull it all the way up through. Now, you've got your male plugs here and they're going to connect to the female openings on this side of your harness. Go ahead and connect those together like so.
Push all the way in and then you're just going to take this lock collar and thread it all the way over the bolt. Excuse me, all the way over the threads until you've got a tight seal. So no water is going to affect your harness or anything like that. You're going to have the full IP68 connection. Next, we'll move on to connecting to the battery.
Connecting to the battery is extremely easy. You're going to take the terminal ring side red and black from your harness and we're just going to direct the red wire is going to come to your positive terminal here on the battery, and the black is going to come to the ground side of your battery. Go ahead and completely disconnect the harness switch before doing this.
We've went ahead and removed this positive nut here from the back of this bolt. Go ahead and place your positive ring terminal over that bolt. Now we're just going to screw that all the way down. We're going to use a size 11 socket here and just all the way down until you've got a tight connection, like so.
Now we can move to the ground side. We went ahead and removed our bolts for the ease of this video. Go ahead and put your ground on followed by your bolt, your nut. Then on this side we're going to be using a 1/2 inch completely tighten down your harness like so.
The last thing that we need to do is run our switch into the cab of the truck. Extremely easy. You're just going to come over here on the driver's side. There's about a four or five inch diameter rubber grommet. Just peel that grommet back and we'll be able to run our harness and our switch right past it and then peel that rubber grommet back over the harness.
Okay, so our harness side is run through our rubber grommet and comes out at the foot well as you can see there, and this is our switch side. What I'm going to do is take this white connector and just run it down this steering column, like so. Let's see if it'll just pop out there at the bottom and then just connect those. Make sure to take note that there's a connector pin at the top and the receiver here at the top of this side. Okay.
Now what we need to do is peel off the back of our switch, make sure we've got a clean place prepared for it, and I'm just going to mount it to the steering column in this particular application, but you can mount it wherever you want it, no problem. Test our light, green is active and I can obviously tell the lights on and red is off. Now all that's left for us to do is to clean up our wires using some zip ties and we're good to go.
That's all there is to installing our Paladin LED Bar here on a 2018 and up Ford F-150. This is extremely bright. The camera can't capture how much light this puts off, but we guarantee that you're going to be pleased with it.
You can check it out at F150LEDs.com where you can find all of our custom built led products for your Ford F-150. We truly appreciate your support and we look forward to seeing you there. Thanks guys.
