How are y'all doing and thanks for tuning in to Wicked Warnings, your number one source
for construction and emergency safety and strobe lighting equipment for cars, vans,
buses, bicycles, tricycles, SUVs, planes, trains, everything between including this beautiful 2022
Dodge Ram 2500 Limited. I guess that's limited production or limited availability. Anyways,
it's limited color for sure. This is all blacked out, black grille, black lights, black bumper,
black mesh, black everything. So what we're looking at, our Thin-X LIN series amber-white,
four of them in the grille there. That's a total color flash both amber and white. It's not split.
That's the pattern that does amber and white alternating with the full view of the light. Above
it is our two head windshield light, also in an amber-white alternation. Now those Thin-X in the
grille do have a flood white capability but we're not taking advantage of that. This particular
client asked for something extremely bright and well-seen. Does some road work so this is what
we came up with on the front. He specifically said “I want four up in the grille” and we talked him
into the windshield light to just add a little bit more high warning in the front because with only
the grille, there was nothing up high towards the front. I will say this, these new Ram grilles are
a little tricky to mount into. Not the easiest thing at all. Now above the tow hooks there,
that's a real easy mounting spot and I like the way it bounces off the whole tow hook bezel area.
You know, it is a little bit low but it's a good spot so we use that quite often. You can also put
another Thin-X under the factory fog light between the parking sensors if you wanted some additional
lower warning on the outer corners and what we did up in the grille was used our mounting bracket,
our 90 degree mounting bracket and an extra-long screw. We actually needed a two-inch screw and
we sandwiched the mounting bracket behind the colored portion insert of the grille and we put
the light on the outside of the grille. We did need to drill a hole above the light straight
backwards to get above and around the active air shutters as well. As I said, all in all, the Ram
grille’s a little tricky to get into but this one turned out pretty nice. On the windshield light,
we're using a dual lock VHB mount on it. Comes with suction cups but you can get that dual lock
Velcro at any home improvement store and you can apply that on your own if you'd like. There's a
quick shout out to some real friendly folks over at Homer Township. If you're on the road and you
see them, give them a wave, let them know you saw their car and truck build over on our channel.
By the way, have I mentioned before that we do door card graphics like that? So if you happen to
be in the area and you need some graphics printed, let us know. We'll be happy to take care of that
for you while your truck is here. Alrighty, around the back of this truck, we did something a little
bit different. I wanted to get some high warning and it was imperative that this warning was as
bright as possible. We were not allowed to do a light bar or anything that could get caught up in
car washes or decrease our height for parking in a garage at home. Obviously, this is a truck that
probably gets taken home. It's a nice new truck. So we wanted to keep it as discreet as we could.
It has a dark tinted window from the factory and there's limited space inside that window,
so we're using our Thin-X Strip. It's a 15.5 inch version. I'm using five of them back here and I
synchronized three of them together underneath the tailgate just to give you a bold alternate
color flash and I did that because as you back far away from the vehicle, I'm hoping that those being
the full display, full color display meaning the whole stick is lighting, both colors not
alternating like above it, then it'll give it a bigger better punch and you see me do two of
these on the outer edges on lots of trucks before. This Dodge had nothing really preventing me from
doing a third one. However, it does have a spare tire access so I couldn't do the two 28’s that
I wanted. I could have on a Ford, we can do two 28”. On the Dodge, there was still a ring there
for the wrench to lower the tire. I believe that would get blocked and I didn't want to do that.
So we did three fifteens. That's what we ended up with. Above it on the cab, I supplemented the VHB
that's already on it with some more VHB, made sure that I had VHB basically end to end on that light.
Truthfully took the small pieces off and reapplied our VHB end to end. You could see our website link
to that VHB we use right here. Just to give me a more permanent full-length bond on it. Underneath
the tailgate, I use the supplied VHB pads with the primer promoter. We're also going to link
that and that was just fine under the tailgate. We also supplement that with a little bit of RTV
sealant on the top and some little dabs of it in between the pads works just fine but up on
the cab of the truck, I want to make sure that car washes and everything else we're not going to end
up having any issues with those lights. So we went full length VHB on it and was able to actually
tuck the wire right in the channel next to the window coming down and I just used a little RTV,
little pea-sized dabs of RTV silicone in the channel, tucked in the wire tightly, taped it up,
let it dry overnight and now the wire is nice and secured running right down the black window.
You really can't see it and for a - basically a company truck, for a Public Works Road Commission,
I think this turned out really nice. Gives him the high warning in the back of a light bar without
having it. Keeps them outside the vehicle, so they're definitely much brighter compared to
behind that dark tinted window and when they're off, doesn't look too bad either. So particularly,
I like this project for Dodge. Dodges are a little difficult to upfit, especially because you can't
really mess with any of their headlight or tail lights yet being that the way they're controlled
through the computer. We personally at Wicked, I don't like to use the vehicle computer as a
tool to manipulate the lighting. I like to let the vehicle computer only worry about vehicle
tasks. So with these Dodges, we haven't yet perfected a method to manipulate that wiring
without involving the vehicle computer as a tool and we don't want to do that. We want that vehicle
computer left clean alone so you never have any issues with that. The other thing that we did I
thought would be pretty useful was we study burn flood all five of these Thin-X lights. So if you
need a little bit of extra backing up light, or loading a trailer light, or any of that,
he's got a secondary switch in there. We were told to keep this package completely simple,
single switch operation but I went ahead and snuck that second switch in without asking because I
think that this extra feature will set it off and the owner driver will really appreciate having
that extra light when he needs it. Alrighty, I’ll try and give you a little pan shot here show you where
I mounted these. You can see, I put the wires for those two coming straight down there together.
Of course, that's the left one. I did off-center that light just by measurement but centered the
LEDs over the license plate. So that's what that one's like and there's you can see that
ring right there we didn't want to block. There's the other one right over there. Carried these all
down together, harnessed them behind the bumper together, synchronize them behind the bumper
together. Alrighty, up here on the roof as you can see, this is where we mounted them. I kind of went
back and forth between glass mount or roof mount. I kept it on the roof to keep it away from the
glass in any of the heating element or anything like that. I just figured the roof would also
give you just a little bit more height. VHB’d it and I did do a small dab strip of black sealant
right across the top here. The other reason I did the roof is it's easy to clean off if we wanted
to get rid all this you know, 3M eraser will take rid of it, take all of it off no problem. You can
see here how the wire tucks in nicely and goes right down there behind the bed straight down.
Now for what it gives you, which is the bright Thin-X lighting right at roof light, roof level,
I think this is a good solution. It might not be for everybody. You might be looking
at this going oh my God, this guy is crazy and if that's your thoughts, that's fine
but I think this is a nice easy solution. It keeps it low profile. I'm not worried about the car
washes smashing it off or anything like that and very very bright. A very bright solution up high
on the back of the Dodge’s which unfortunately, I haven't even quite yet figured out how to
manipulate that but I do want to manipulate that very soon. By the way, any of my Jeep friends out
there, I'm sure you can see the reflection there LJ Nation. Used to have one of my own. Got rid of
it. Kind of miss it. So drop a comment if you're a Jeeper. Maybe I'll get back into the Jeep world
one day but ended up selling that LJ that you saw in some of my other videos. So it's in a new home
in North Dakota. So if you got anybody in North Dakota, keep an eye out for my old Jeep. Kept
it kind of simple right here in this panel here. We did a flash and a flood switch. Fair warning,
we needed to relocate- there's a device behind that panel that we relocated up back behind
there to make some room for these switches. So if you have that blue rip cord device back there,
you're going to need to relocate that as well and all we did was face it downward basically
back behind the panel. If you pulled the panel out which was easy to do, you can actually still
see it in there and get to it just- need to make a little bit more room for those switches right
there. These are battery-fed of course, so you can use them anytime you want. Full illumination
red and amber. So it's very easy to see when you're up here driving the truck. You can't
be driving around not knowing that your stuff is on and this flash flood label actually when
you're sitting in the seat kind of disappears. You see it when you open the door but it's not real
ugly or noticeable and for a fleet vehicle, it might be driven by a lot of different people,
probably a good idea but easy enough to just pick off if you didn't like it and it wasn't
to your liking. I'm not going to spend too much time talking about the tow hook mount other than
it's right there above the tow hook. So fairly easy. You can mount a variety of lights there.
I mean pretty much anything will fit and we ran the wiring basically straight backwards up right
behind the headlight. So that's easy enough. These little buggers here though, these are a little
bit difficult to mount. As I said, kind of took loose this outer plastic up top, did a bunch of 10
millimeters to take loose here and then there was some parts where you put your straight screwdriver
in and you could pop it. After you take this upper trim off, you'll be able to get it apart and you
can kind of pull this forward a little bit, get your hand back there and then as far as the hole,
you can kind of see it. It's peeking right in here. See it right there. So that's the hole that
goes straight forward. I'll show you another angle on that hole but that's how we mounted
those and they're really just kind of sandwiched. If you look over here on this hole right here,
the wire is going to go right through the center and the light is sitting bridged between these
two ribs like this. The foam gasket tightens it up real nice, locks it in place. Now you can see
the hole that we put for the wire right there on the top. Barely noticeable up and over the
active shutters and as I said, you put this light in here. This is solid. It's not going anywhere.
So I'm not too worried about it and as I pan over and show you the other side, you can kind of see,
ends up on a nice angle there tip down just slightly but with the linear lens on the Thin-X,
doesn't matter at all. So I'm happy with that mount and going to run with this one. All in all,
fairly clean mount for these Rams and as I said, did not necessitate taking the entire grille off
the truck. I had to take the top header off, pop the grille out a little bit, and then go from
there. So pretty easy DIY install if you're going to do something like this yourself. Just a quick
little bit about where we're running wiring. This particular truck doesn't have aux switches. Oh
man, I know right. So we went right through that bulkhead right there and I can't say it enough,
always out and down, out and down with the wiring. Comes over here and we catch a battery feed right
here. That's where our fuse is. Labeled it, tucked it in, grabbed the battery feed right there. So fairly
easy to wire this one in. Alrighty, so I'll close out this video kind of talking just a little bit
more about all the parts on this and how it goes together. That way, if you're to do this build
on your own, you got kind of an idea. We've got four Thin-X LIN series amber-white in the front
grille. We extended each one of those Thin-X with our 22-5 to just make it easy and give us all the
functions of each one of those lights and at the fender, under the hood, we joined that down to a
single 18-2 and took it inside to the switch. Very easy. So we're going to supply 25 feet of
22-5 to extend those Thin-X up to the fender area. We're also going to supply you some 1/8,
some 3/16, and some 1/4-inch inch heat shrink variety to make sure all your connections are
good and waterproof. Above that is the windshield light that comes with everything it needs and
it has a cigarette lighter cord on it from the factory. Of course, we needed to cut that off to
use the switch. So you will need to cut that off on the windshield light for you to hard
wire it. Once you cut it off, there's five wires underneath there but basically all you need to
worry about is red and black and blue and you can power with red and black, set pattern with blue.
We have a fuse kit underneath the hood. From the battery fuse, we ran a 16-2 into the cabin
of the truck. Now the only length we have 16-2 available is 25 feet. We're going to go ahead
and include that in this bundle as well to give you the adequate length to get into the cab of
the truck from the fuse at the battery and for any other needs you might have. Running forward from
the tailgate, as well as the bulkhead right in the front of the bed where the two Thin-X join on the
back window, we have 18-3. So we're going to put 50 feet 18-3 in there as well. That'll give you
more than enough to go from the back tailgate all the way forward and from the front higher
Thin-X in the back forward. Now we're using just a little bit of 22-5 to extend one of those Thin-X,
the passenger over to the driver and we will have that little cutoff left from the front four
lights of 22-5. Then you join those two together, synchronize them, and carry an 18-3 forward. We've
got two rocker switches, one was amber, one was red. We got 3M Primer Promoter for the adhesion
sticky and we have that 3M by the roll if you want to buy the long length of 3M for the top
lights. We're going to put links into all of that. I don't have any other real behind the scenes data
for this build. This is it. I'm trying to explain everything and how we did it. Split loom, tape,
etc. We have some of that available in our store. Some of it you'll have to get locally.
We're trying our best to really give you more and more supplies in our store, so bear with us
with that and hopefully you like this build. Show you the back a little bit more here as I talk and
close out this video. If you have any questions on the build, feel free to email us in at info,
info@wickedwarnings.com and mention this build. This build is number 20343, 20343 and you can
call in and get a little bit more information on that. If you're curious, how many hours to ballpark
for a job like this? I would put eight on the book and that's for a skilled technician. If you were
DIYing this, I'd probably leave two days just to make sure you had enough time. I definitely
leave two days to let all the RTV silicone dry and all that other stuff the sealant dry up but
eight labor hours is not out of the question for something like this in a shop. I hope all
that info was helpful. Like I said, I'd be happy to talk to you about any of the details you want
to give me a shout, talk about the build, drop an email and mention this truck or link to the video
we'd appreciate it and if you got questions about your own vehicle, please don't forget to send in
the photos of your own vehicle because that makes it so much easier for me and my staff to help you
guys out and get you the parts you need is when we can see your vehicle with the parking lights
on always. That way, we can tell what lenses you have. So thanks again for watching Wicked
Warnings, your number one source for construction and emergency safety strobe lighting equipment
for cars, vans, buses, bicycles, tricycles, golf carts, wheelchairs, and really beautiful
Dodge Limited Rams just like this one here. Bring your truck in. Get it lit. Build 20343.