I took advantage of the nice weather today, and I hard wired my LED light bar. Below are several pics that I took while doing so, as well as a write up of what I did, and the mistakes that I made along the way.
For tools you'll need a set of wire strippers, a crimping tool, and a pair of pliers.
You'll also need to purchase a few things, if you don't already have 'em lying around.
4 or 5 (if also doing reverse) pieces of wire of different colors
4 or 5 waterproof butt connectors
4 or 5 quick splice connectors
regular electrical tape
rubber electrical tape (weather proof cold shrink tape)
several tie wraps
lots of patience
I cut the strips of wire into about 4 or 5 inch pieces. This was long enough to be easy to work with, yet short enough where you don't have to worry too much about excess. I had some wire from some sort of project that I did in the past, but I only had 3 different colors, and what I did to make up for this was I cut 2 separate red wires, but on one of them I marked them with 2 stripes using a black Sharpie so I could tell 'em apart.
The reason that I decided to use pigtails for two fold. The first reason was that the wire size on my LED bar was quite small (looked like #22 or #24), where the wire on my harness was either #16 or #18 and tying them in together might have given me some grief. The second reason was in case I made a mistake on the wiring (which I did) and reversed my turn signals, it would be easier to make a new connection with butt connectors than with the quick splice connectors. The pic below is of the pig tails that I made.
I tapped into the trailer plug that sits to the left of the license plate. You'll notice if you look closely that there is a wiring diagram on the cover.
I forgot to take a pic of the back side of the plug before I disconnected it. Here is a pic of the back side of the plug after everything is completed though. It should work for illustration purposes.
Once the plug is disconnected, pull it down below the bumper where you can work on it without lying on your back. You'll need to remove the tape that is holding the wires together, then separate the wires. There is a gray plastic cover that is on the back, but it's pretty easy to remove by pinching a couple of clips (again I forgot to take a pic of it)
on my truck the wire colors are as listed below:
Black with a gray stripe is the ground
Brown is for the running and stop lights
White with a red stripe is for reverse (I didn't use this one as I had previous wired my reverse directly to the reverse light)
White with orange stripe is the left turn signal
white with the green stripe is the right turn signal
***it should be noted here that I had to reverse my left and right turn signal wires because when I tested 'em they were backwards. I'm not sure if this is because I made a mistake with the white/orange and white/green or if the mistake was when I was determining which wires were which on the pig tail coming off of my LED strip light***
I connected my pigtails to the LED light bar using the butt connectors, then connected the other end of the wires to the wires on the harness.
I then wrapped all of the connections in standard electrical tape.
I then wrapped everything in the rubber tape, to make it weather proof. Don't be afraid of this stuff, use as much as you feel you need to. Once it sets it's almost impossible to get off without cutting it.
Don't do what I did. Make sure that all of your wires are run on the same size of all obstructions. I fortunately had enough slack in the wires where it didn't really matter. I may go back and fix this afterward... my wires from my strip light run on the opposite side of my trailer hitch than the harness does.
You're ready to test everything. If everything works the way it should (and it should if you didn't make the same mistakes I did) you can put everything back together, tie wrapping the wires up out of the way for a nice clean look.
Exco
