|
Now
it's time to setup the LED lights. If you splice the LEDs directly into
the OEM harness, they'll flash very fast when you turn on your blinkers
or hazard lights. I think that on YJ's you can fix this by replaced
the regular flasher relay with a heavy duty unit, but on a TJ you either
need to modify the flasher relay itself (the article on Rockcrawler.com
goes over this) or do what we did and use an inline resistor. The resistor
you'll need is a 20W 8W resistor. You can pick them up at RadioShack
for about $1.75 a piece (you'll need one for each light).
strip back the
insulation from the power and ground wires |
connect the resistor
and solder the leads |
Carefully
strip away about ¼" of the insulation from the red (power) and white
(ground) wires on the LED pigtails as shown. Now connect the resistor
into the pigtail where you stripped the insulation off. Solder the connections
then seal them with some heat shrink wrap or silicon to prevent them
from corroding.
the tail light
wiring harness... |
ground the white
pigtail wire to the body |
When you cut the
stock tail lights off, leave enough of the harness on the body to attach
the new LED pigtails to. The OEM harness has 3 wires - the black wire
is negative, the wire with the reddish stripe is positive/power, and
the purple wire is for the reverse lights.
the pigtail ziptied
together, the grommet goes in first though |
yeah, that's
how it's supposed to go in... |
As mentioned above,
the white wire on the pigtail is the ground wire and will to be connected
to the body somewhere. Easy enough, just put a ¼" ring terminal on the
end and connect it to the back of one of the ¼" mounting bolts for the
OYR panels. Then connect the red wire on the pigtail to the original
red-stripped wire and the black wire to the original black wire. To
mount the lights, simply push the grommet into place on the body then
snap the light into the grommet.
A Lite-N-Bolt |
not a ton of
light, but it works, and it's legal, pretty slick too! |
The
support bars for our Garvin rack have a license plate mount built-in,
so we didn't have to mess with drilling any holes for mounting the plate.
The Lite-N-Boltz fit the original mounting holes perfectly and come
with plastic nuts so you don't over torque them and break the Lite-N-Bolt
itself (the plastic nut will break before the bolt). Wire the Lite-N-Boltz
together then ground one wire and connect the other wire to the positive
tail light lead.
Use the purple
wire to power the reverse lights. |
The new reverse
lights secured in place. |
For the reverse
lights you can simply spice into the purple wire on the passenger-side
tail light harness. There's only one power wire for the reverse lights
going from the firewall to the back anyway, so running both new reverse
lights off this wire is no problem. The lights are mounted to the tire
carrier on either side of the tire (a 32" BFG MT in this pic). Unfortunately
our current 35's block the lights, so we're going to have to move them.
We also rigged the lights up on a 2-way switch on the dash, so we can
turn them on whenever we want (good for tailgaters), or just have them
on come in reverse as normal. That's all there is to it.
The final product. |
So who's ready
to wheel? |
Back
to the corner guards
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