| LED Taillight Installation | ||
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Start with a Jeep... Brandon Rickerman, president of New Mexico 4-Wheelers, was nice enough to let Mesa 4x4 help out with and document the installation of his lights. |
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Remove the existing tail lights. | |
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Decide on the location of your new LED lights. We placed Brandon's so that the bottom of the LED template was flush with the bottom of the existing wiring harness hole. This kept us low enough to miss the top of the fender well and high enough for the grommet to clear the gas filler. This also made cutting easy as the hole to start the jigsaw was already there. | |
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Once you decide on the location, place the template in place on the driver's side and punch holes through the template where the stock mounting bolts are. Mark a "D" on the side of the template facing out. (You'll see why later.) | |
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On both the driver's and pagssenger's side - cover the area to be cut with duct tape and poke holes through the tape where the stock taillight mounting bolts were located. (The duct tape prevents the paint from chipping during cutting.) | |
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"Install" the template on the driver's side using the stock mounting bolts. Make sure the "D" is facing out. Trace the shape of the template onto the duct tape and remove the template. Repeat on the passenger side making sure that the "D" is facing in. (For both sides, the top should be the same.) This creates a "mirror image" of the driver's side mounting location on the passneger side. | |
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Driver's side corner with the template traced onto the duct tape. | |
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Cut out the holes with your favorite implement of destruction (we used a jigsaw), remove the duct tape, and clean up your cut edges with a hand file, die-grinder, or whatever. | |
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Install the grommets.
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For the wiring, we cut the plugs off of the stock tail lights and spliced in
the LED pigtails using solder and heatshrink. The white (ground) wire coming
from the LED plug was connected to the tub. The reverse wire coming from the
stock tail light plug will be wired up to some driving lights on another day. ********************************************************************************** A friend of mine Brian R. provided me this information for you TJ owners...The wiring on his 1998 TJ (he thinks it may be the same for all TJs 1997-2000) was as follows: Drivers side: * Tail = black/yellow * Brake/turn = green/red Passenger Side: * Tail = black/yellow * Brake/turn = brown/red Reverse Lights: * Purple on both sides. ********************************************************************************** |
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Install the LED lights into the grommets from the inside of the tub making sure that
the LED housings are completely inside the grommet lip. Plug in the wires... you are
done! Note: If your flasher stops working or is flashing at an extremely fast rate - replace your existing flasher with a "variable load" flasher. These are available at almost any autoparts store. |
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