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Hey guys, it's Nick from F150LEDs.com. Today we're here with our 2015 Ford F-150 and we're going to be showing you how to install our Paladin Series CREE 5-watt LED curved bar here in the lower intake space of your truck. Now this installation is going to work on EcoBoost and non EcoBoost engines. We'll show you the variant for the non EcoBoost as well.
The installation is fairly simple. We just got to take this lower intake grate off the truck and make a small modification, mount our bar, and then we'll be able to put this lower intake grill back on. It's a great light. We're sure you're going to love it. We're going to show you how it's installed right now.
The first thing that we need to do is remove this plastic lower intake guard here and we're just going to take a couple of Flathead screwdrivers, a pry tool, anything like that would work great. We're just going to kind of come around the edge and just kind of pry this away from the bumper. It's just kind of got some push in tabs. So you can just work your way around this lower intake and you'll feel it start to kind of just pull away from the bumper. If you've got a painted bumper, be careful not to scratch your paint. And once you get it kind of off the edge a bit just kind of start to pull it away from the bumper. And then we're going to work our way around the bottom and to the other side and this whole piece we'll just pull right off.
Now I need to make a couple of minor modifications to our lower intake grill guard here so that our bar can fit. We're going to open up these two columns here, right here in the middle because our LED bar is going to be fitting right into that place. Now if you're installing on a non EcoBoost version and you've got the solid intake bracket guard. We're going to show you how to do that as well. But on this lower intake bracket, what you're going to do is go ahead and align your bar. That's about one and five eights inch on the top and one in five eights inch on the bottom to get it right there in the center. And once you've aligned, go ahead and make some marks here on the side of your bars.
Like so, you want to give yourself one eights inch, maybe one 16 a little bit of a playroom there. Now we're just going to go ahead and connect those markings. Like so. Now all that we need to do is follow these lines and cut this piece of plastic and this piece of plastic out. Because again our bar is going to slide right into that area. What we're going to be using is a Dremel, but you can use a hacksaw. It's very soft plastic and easy to cut. So any tool that you have for cutting is good. Since we're using this Dremel, I'm going to use my glasses and then we're just going to cut these out.
Now that we've got our opening cleared, let's go ahead and set our bar right back here on the top. And we're just going to make a marking right here, centered with the bar and halfway between this top edge and bottom edge of this vertical piece right here. So just get the bar, make sure it's centered back up. For a second. We're going to make a mark right there. Now we'll do that on this side as well. And we'll just make two drill holes on each side. One here, one here with a three eights inch drill bit, drill bit excuse me. And that is where we will be mounting our bar.
Okay, so we've got our bar here inserted into our lower intake bracket. Go ahead and start with the wire side of your bar. So you'll want to kind of put that in first and attach the bolt. And then you'll want to bring in the non wire side into the lower intake. It's a bit of a tight fit, but that's by design. So it will kind of wedge right in there. And then when you're putting your bolts in, take the small of the bolts that are included. Go ahead and run a nut all the way to the base of your bolt and then put your lock washer on top of that. And then you'll just need a line up your bar here with your lower intake. Now just use the included Allen wrench and tighten both of your bolts all the way down.
Okay, we've got our lower intake bar along with our lower intake insert here pressed back into the bumper. It looks fantastic. The next thing we need to do is wire it for power. The first thing that we're going to do is run our IP68 connector here down through the engine bay. So we can connect it to our LED bar. So you'll find an open space that you'll just be able to lower it down through to the bottom of the truck. Now we'll be able to grab it and connect it with our LED bar. You'll notice that there are two male prongs here and a notch. So you're going to want to line those up, press all the way together. You'll notice there's two weather seal strips here, we're going to bring our lock ring collar right over that. Tighten all the way down and it's going to give us our IP68 connection.
Now let's connect our harness to our battery power. First, attach the red terminal ring to the red positive side of your battery. Now attach the black terminal ring to your black ground side of your battery. Now we just to run our switch side of our harness into the cab of the truck so we can connect it to our on and off switch and control the LED bar light. In order to do that, there is a round circular grommet located right here where my hand is right between the engine bay and the cab of the truck. Now it's hard to show on camera. So you can see it in this picture, but it's around circle grommet. You can peel the edge of that grommet back, run your wire through it all the way through and then peel that rubber grommet back into place.
The last thing that we need to do is hook up our switch here to the harness that we've run in the truck. So what you do is take your switch and we're just going to run the connector here, right here down the steering wheel column. So you'll just put this white piece here in your steering column. It'll run right out the bottom here by your pedals. And then we're going to connect that. This is the harness that we just ran through that circular rubber grommet. So we're just going to go ahead and connect those together like so. You'll see your switch light up. That means you got your hookup to battery done correctly. We're going to remove our adhesive cover protector here on our switch, and then we're just going to go ahead and place it. You can place it wherever you like.
We kind of like to come up here in this empty space here, press down firmly. It's a good idea to clean this area as well before you mount your switch. Okay. Now all this left to do is ... We'll tidy up our wires here inside the cab and we'll do the same in the engine bay. Make sure we don't have any loose wires in our harness. So that's all there is to installing our Paladin Series bar here in a lower intake area of your 2015, 16 or 17 Ford F-150 of any engine type.
The camera can't capture how bright and how great this thing works, but it puts off a lot of light and is really going to light up the night in front of you and definitely help your F-150 stand out and shine brighter. Even when the bar is off, it helps give that aggressive, unique look to your F-150. You can check them out at F150LEDs.com where you can find all of our custom LED lighting products for your Ford F-150. We truly appreciate your support and look forward to seeing you there. Thanks guys.