Hey, guys, John here with realtruck.com.
And today I want to show you how to install the Paramount Evolution LED Grille on this
2012 F-150.
[music]
As you can see here, we've got a grille out of the box.
It comes with everything that you need to get hooked up to your truck.
Wirings already hooked up to the lights.
So all you have to do is install a harness.
And I don't know about you guys, but I'm ready to get this thing into the truck.
Okay, guys, so the first thing we need to do is get this old grille out of the truck.
It's not too tough to do.
There's some hex bolts across the top and some torque screws across the bottom.
Okay, now, that we've got all of our hex nuts removed from the top of our grille shell,
we'll go ahead and remove these Torx screws, and then we should be ready to pull this grille
off the truck.
Okay, now, we've got all these Torx screws out of there.
We can go ahead and remove our grille from the truck.
Just like that, guys.
Set this off to the side, and then we'll be ready to put our Evolution LED Grille in.
All right, so we're gonna take our new grille.
We’re just gonna set it up on here like so.
We'll make sure that we bring it in from the top side so that our clips actually go in
place.
But honestly, guys, this is probably the hardest part of the whole thing right here.
I wanna bring this down so I can see the top of it.
Okay, once we have that set in place, we’ll open the hood back up.
And then we can start putting everything back in here.
So first thing I wanna do here is go ahead and attach these hex nuts to the top here,
to hold this in place.
All right, now that we've got our hex nuts attached to the top, we'll go ahead and put
all of our Torx screws in the bottom.
I already went ahead and put these on the end just to hold this in place.
So that way, we can get the rest of these in here and just push them right up into place,
kind of get them started through this brace bar here and then just run them in.
All right, now, we have our grille attached.
We're ready to go ahead and start wiring this up.
Now, I've already went ahead and wired in our wiring harness to our switch inside the
truck and got that ready to go.
And now, you will need to get a wiring harness to install this.
There are some different ones that are available.
You just wanna make sure you get one with a switch and a relay.
You can do this a couple different ways.
You can either wire the center light up on its own switch and the two outer ones on their
own switch, so you have two switches.
Or you can just wire it to a single switch, so you turn one switch on, they all come on.
And that's how we're gonna do it on this truck.
So let's get this wired up.
So I’ve gone ahead and wired our two outer lights together and got our butt connectors
on here.
Now, since this is on the outside of the vehicle where it's susceptible to moisture, I would
recommend the heat shrink tape, because they come with a sealer and a glue that is gonna
seal these up and held keep all that moisture out.
So I've got my wiring run into my switch.
I'm gonna go ahead and hook that up right here.
Now, once I have these connected, then we'll heat-shrink these down, and then we'll be
ready to wire the main center light into our switch wiring.
Now, something to keep in mind here, when you're doing this, that probably the best
way, if you're not used to doing this a lot with a little mini torch like this would be
to use a heat gun or a hair dryer.
And that way, you don't burn your wires.
Okay, so we've got that all heat-shrunk down.
So the next thing we're gonna do is wire up our center light.
And the way we're gonna do that is we're just gonna use some Scotchloks and apply them right
on to our wiring here.
Now, something to keep in mind, because we are using Scotchloks on this external wiring,
is to make sure that when we're all done that we wrap this really good in some electrical
tape to help keep the moisture and such out of there.
Let’s have that wire in there, then we just squeeze this down, and this will connect them
together.
Clip it closed.
And then we'll do the other wire.
Okay, all those in place, so we're just gonna tape all this up, and then we'll run some
zip strips here to hold all this wiring up and keep it from hanging down here in our
engine compartment.
Okay, guys, we've got our wires all hooked together, got it all taped up nicely to keep
the moisture and grime and such out of it from the roads.
And, now, we're just gonna zip strip this wire up here, so that's nice and neat.
It doesn't get in the way of anything.
And, plus, we really just don't want it hanging down there looking bad on the front of our
truck either.
So get this all hooked up here.
We've run our wires across here.
There's a couple ways you could do this.
You can either wire these little lights separate from the big one, or you can wire them all
together and so they use one switch, turns them all at the same time.
And that's what we did with this particular install.
So we ran our wires down and put them along this bar here, the support bar, and ran them
through the hood, because this is fiberglass aftermarket hood, and that allowed us to be
able to do that.
On yours, you can pretty much run them along your hood.
You can put some screws in and actually put some hooks to hold the wiring in place, keep
it nice and neat and tidy.
We put it all on a wire loom, ran it down through, brought it out down here, put it
through the firewall to our switch.
And here in just a second, I'll show you where we mounted the switch up and attached our
relay.
Ran our wires all the way across.
Put them in this nice loom to keep it nice and neat and tidy.
Hooked are hot wire up to our battery positive terminal with the 30-amp fuse connector.
And so that's all ready to go.
And I'll show you guys where we put the switch in here, because I know some of you guys are
sometimes interested in that.
So let's take a look at that.
This is gonna vary depending on your vehicle.
But on this F-150, all these pieces just kind of snap out of place.
So that allowed us to bring this whole section out, drill a hole in here and put our switch
in here, ran the wiring up underneath the dash through the firewall, brought it up to
our switch.
So we have a nice switch to turn on and off.
So there you go.
Let's get this hood closed up and take a look at what this thing looks like all it up.
There you have it.
That's how quick and easy it is to install the Paramount Evolution LED Grille into our
truck.
So remember, until next time, happy motoring.