BAMF behind the grill light bar

well darn... but thanks. ill keep posted in case yall make one.

 

Light force 170s but with no trans cooler

 

Putting mine on this weekend, and attaching my hella horns. will post pics once it's done.

 

All done!

 

I'm thinking about putting one in the center. Would it fit behind the satoshi? I know my Hella 700ff wouldn't fit behind the center because the bar was blocking.

 

my grill is a homertaco satoshi. I had to turn the brackets I used to mount the horns around for them to fit, but it worked.

 

Mine is pretty much the same as his. I even have the same mesh as you from him. Haha. But if you look at yours with the brackets turned around. Does it fit in the middle? Or would the center beam down the middle block it from fitting with the satoshi?

 

i'll look tomorrow and let you know.

 

Awesome! Thanks man

 

does anyone have photos of how they wired the lights? i am itching to put my lights on the bar.

 

I do not think a horn would work in the center. Maybe if you had the super think lip satoshi, but a standard one, the horn is too thick to put in the center.

 

Ah, thanks for checking!

 

What do you mean? Which part of the wiring?

 

How it's wired to the battery with a switch inside the cab. I want to do a really clean install and I'm just looking for ideas on how to do it. I also want it to have a fuse.

 

Many of the lights come with a harness & relay. So pretty much connect FUSED power to the battery, that goes to the relay. Then You have an Switched Power coming off the relay going to the lights itself. The relay also has a ground coming off it. And Finally a switched power connected to your in switch mounted inside the cab.

 

I ran the wiring up from the lights and zip tied it to the light bar for a clean look, I used one of the holes in the radiator frame to run over and behind the battery, i wired the 30 amp relay and usually you can mount the relay somewhere on the side of the engine bay above the wheel well behind the main fuse block. The relay usually has a diagram to tell you which wires go where. I use inline fuses with more than enough amps for the lights I'm running, to pick the right fuse you divide total watts of the lights by volts of the system. In my case, one of the two pairs is 230 watts and our trucks are 12 volt systems so (230 divided by 12 = 19.12 amps), so I use a 25 amp fuse on the primary hot lead coming from the battery to the relay. For simplicity's sake I ran both pairs of leads from the lights back to the ground and relay and used the battery ground for the lights but you don't have to use that ground, any point on the chassis where you can contact bare metal will work. For the switch you can carefully poke a hole through the rubber grommet that surrounds the main harness of wires going into the cab, it's located below and just outboard of you brake master cylinder, that gets your leads into the cab, from there you can pop the lower panel off above the cab fuse block (bottom left of dash), and wire up a switch, you need to ground the switch as well, you can look for/use any grounding screw you may find under there or you can just run your ground back to the main battery ground along with your other switch wires.
And a word of caution: If you turn on your lights and any of the hot wires start to heat up anywhere in your lighting system, you need to replace them with a thicker gauge wire. Most of these systems you buy are 55w bulbs with 16 GA wire, but if you upgrade the bulbs to a higher wattage (say 100 or 130), consider replacing all the stock wires with 14 GA (thicker).

 

Perfect thanks. What lights did you install? I'm thinking about the Lightforce 170. Maybe Rigid Duallies. Any recommendations?

 

thanks for the help. do you have a pic of the interior switch? also, does the lightforce 170 package come with everything that i need to do the job?

 

Mine are mounted on the front of the center vault between the seats, they are placed where my fingers fall when i rest my right arm on the center console, i'll try to get a pic up tomorrow, and not sure on the 170's I don't have them (but would like to!)

 

The interior switch can be anything you want. Including from these guys.

I guess "comes with everything" depends on what you think everything should be. Most lights include the light and whatever comes with it. Very often, unless the manufacturer specifically says it comes with a wiring harness, it won't.

The Rigid Dually (get the 2) kit comes with the harness. Some Hella lamps do not come with a harness. The LF 170's I looked up didn't come with a harness either. A wiring harness supplied by the manufacturer does make life a lot easier. You can DIY too.