1997 - 2003 PALADIN 32" 150W CREE Behind The Grille LED Bar

Hey guys, it's Nick from F150LEDs.com. Today I've got Adam with me, one of our awesome team members and fellow F-150 drivers and he's going to be helping show us how easy it is to get our CREE Paladin Bar installed here on a '98 to '03 Ford F-150. So you can have an awesome bar that not only admits a great deal of light, but looks great on the truck and it's going to keep you and your family safer at night. Let's go ahead and get to the install.

First thing we need to do is remove this plastic shroud from the top of our vehicle. There's about eight pop-up tabs that you'll just take a flathead screwdriver and just pop them right up. We went ahead and remove them for the sake of time in this video. So once you get those up, your plastic shroud will just come right off. Just go ahead and set that to the side, and that'll give us access to our six Phillips head screws that are on top of your grill piece. So we're going to take a Phillips head number two screwdriver, and go ahead and start removing the screws so that we can remove our grill.

Okay, now that we've removed these screws, there's a few pop tabs that run along the side up under your grill piece right here. We're going to take a flathead screwdriver or a pry tool and we're just going to start prying these pop tabs out from under your grill piece. There's about five or six of these prop tabs. I'm just going to get up under there, with some slight pressure they'll pop right out, and as soon as they pop out it's going to release this rubber piece and then we're going to go ahead and head over to the driver's side and do the same thing.

Okay, now what we're going to need to do is locate two Phillips head screws that are right behind your front blinker assembly. So to remove this front blinker assembly, there is a Torx head bolt that is located right inside your engine Bay. Take a size 15 Torx head driver and just go ahead and remove this bolt. Once you have your bolt removed all you're going to need to do is apply a little bit of pressure from behind your blinker assembly and it'll wiggle ride out.

Okay, now that we've removed our front blinker assembly, that gives us access to our two Phillips head screws located here and here. So what we're going to need to do is go ahead and remove these two screws, and then we'll head over to the other side and remove those as well. Now we can pull the grill directly off the truck.

Okay, so now what we're going to do is get our bar ready to be mounted to our truck. So, how we do that is we're going to take our brackets and our included hardware and go ahead and mount them to your bar. So what we're going to do is take our small bolt, go ahead and put our included lock washer and washer onto our bolt. I'm going to take our bracket and with the bottom hole facing outward we're going to slide our bolt through the top hole and go ahead and begin to mount our bracket to the bar. For now, we're just going to go ahead and get it hand tight, and we're going to do the same for the other side.

Okay, now that we have our brackets mounted to our bar, we're going to go ahead and place our bar on this metal bar that's right on the inside of your grill. Once you place it up here, we're going to go ahead and center our bar to the center of the truck. What we like to do is count these top screws right here. You'll count all the way over to your 12th screw, which should be exactly the center of your bar. So once you have your bar centered up with your truck what you are going to need to do is take a Sharpie and just draw a little circle inside the hole of your bracket on both sides of your bar, and then that'll let us know where we need to drill.

Now we're going to take a drill and a 5/16th drill bit, and as much as possible we're going to drill straight down into our metal bar where we've marked both of our holes.

Okay, now that we've drilled our holes we went ahead and put our bar back up on the truck, took your included bolts and drop them into each side of your bar. Once we did that we took our nut, put it on the bottom of your bolt, tighten down your bolt all the way so that your bar is firmly secured to your truck. Now you still have a little bit of leeway on which way you want your bar facing. Once you determine which way and what angle you want your bar to be facing, you're going to take your included Allen wrench and go ahead and tighten down both bolts on the side of your bar.

Okay, now that we've mounted our bar to the truck, we went ahead and put our grill piece back into place, and our next step is going to be to reach inside back behind your grill and find your harness connection that's coming from your LED bar. Okay, so now what we're going to want to do is take the connection that's coming from your wiring harness. This connection is going to be wired to your battery, and that's where you're going to get your power from.

These are our new heavy duty IP-68 weatherproof connections. What we're going to do is take our male end of the connection and line this notch up on this side of the connection with this small hole right here on the female end of the connection. So we're going to go ahead and connect those, and we're going to take our lock ring, slide it up, and twist it into place. This lock ring is going to fully weatherproof our connection. Now once we've done that we're going to go ahead and hook up our harness to our battery.

Okay, so it connects to the battery what we're going to do is take our positive terminal ring, go ahead and slide it over the nut to your battery, and we're going to take a size eight socket and use it to tighten down the terminal ring to the battery.

Once our positive's in place we're going to do the same thing with our negative terminal ring. Slide it over the nut to your battery. We're going to use a size eight again to tighten this terminal ring to your battery.

So now what we're going to do is take our wiring harness that we've ran across our engine bay over to our driver's side. We're going to take our thinner part of your wiring harness and run it in between this plastic piece and your metal frame. Just begin to tuck this piece in between your plastic piece and your metal frame, and you may need to use a flathead screwdriver to help you get this piece into place.

Now that we ran the switch into the cab what we're going to need to do is pull away from this rubber door seal, slide your switch right behind it, and then push that rubber door seal right back into place. Now that we've done that we're going to pull away on this fuse panel cover. It's just a few pop tabs that'll come right out. We're going to run our switch right up into right past this fuse panel, and then now that's going to allow us to mount your switch in a few different mounting locations just based off your preference.

Great job on the install, man. The bar looks fantastic here behind the grill of your '98 to '03 F-150 Ford Lariat. The Paladin LED series is a great upgrade option for your Ford F-150. You can check it out at F150LEDS.com, where you can find all of our custom LED lighting products built to improve your F-150 experience. Be sure to click the subscribe button below to stay up-to-date with our latest and greatest products. We look forward to seeing you soon at F150LEDs.com. Thanks guys.