How are y'all doing and thanks for watching. This is George at Wicked Warnings, your number one source
for construction and emergency safety and strobe lighting equipment, kind of like this very popular
Wicked Warnings Thin-X amber-clear light. This is our LIN Series 2 in amber-clear. We're going to
be putting that right in the badge here. A lot of people have written in wondering how we remove
the badge. How do we mount a light in there, and how do we get that effect and get the
wiring from here to where it needs to go, which is usually the auxiliary switches underneath the hood.
So to start with, I'm gonna pan down and show you my tool set that I prefer to use for this job.
These are my favorite tools for this job right here. We've got plastic pry bars. We've got a long
pick set. We've got our popular Thin-X LIN and we've got a drill bit with a unibit in a long extension.
Now you can get this kind of extension at Home Depot. You can get the
drill bit at Home Depot as well, and as you can see, we just put a spot of weld on that to lock
it in place but that's not necessary. It's just an option. So first thing you're going to want to do
is take those plastic pry bars and you're going to want to put them behind the badge
and start to pry out here and here, and then follow down the side of the badge here. You're gonna work
from this edge and from this edge, from this edge and this edge. You're gonna probably use
multiple pry bars. You'll probably have something going on like this where you're prying them out
and then you're gonna have to get in there once in a while with one of the pick tools
to release the metal clip. What I mean by that is these are the metal clips that hold that badge on,
and sometimes when they're very very tight in there, pardon my shaky hand, you have to
get in there with your pick tool and kind of push this part down right here.
Your badge is going to be inserted like this. Okay, and you're going to not see any of this stuff
because it's going to be in the body. So you have to get in there with your pick tool and push
right here. You have to kind of pry behind this front edge like that and get down in there and
push, and by pushing on that back part right there, it will release and pop out. Once in a while,
these will simply let the plastic slide right out. Sometimes it bends those little fasteners
in there as well. If these little teeth, those little retainer teeth get all bent,
just clip them off and then bend the clip a little bit tighter this way, and slide it back
on and reuse it. You can also buy these clips new at Ford if you prefer but see those little
retainer teeth in there, sometimes those get mangled and we'll just cut those off no big deal.
So sometimes the clips will stay in the truck. Sometimes the clips will pop off with the badge.
All the time, you're gonna be using these two tools to work it. You might even have one of
these tools in your mouth, just depending. Three-four hands, four hands work best, but we all have
two at birth. So play with it like that. Now through the magic of movie making, we've removed
it. You can see here on the back, this particular badge, the clips all kind of slid off real nicely.
You can see back here the four areas that the clips are on right? One, two, three, four,
and those are the four clips where these body clips snap in right here,
and as I said, sometimes they stay in the body like that,
and that's not a big deal because you can get them right back out of the body.
You just reach your finger around, sorry about that focus bomb,
there we go. So when they're stuck in the body like that, you just reach finger around like this
and pop them right out the back, and now you're good to go.
So that's how you're going to do that. Once you have the badge
here and it's out, I usually flip it right over and on the back here, you'll see some embossing
about the middle of the badge. The little clips here on the top, here in the middle, and here
on the bottom. Right in the middle here, you'll drill a hole for your wire, right here for your
Thin-X light. You'll run the wire right through there. You'll mount it to there
right in there like that. This is what it's going to look like when it's
mounted, and you're going to use the provided screws to affix the light to the lens- to the
grille here, and on the back where the screws will come through, I usually cut a small piece of plastic or
use one of those metal speed clips, put a little bit of extra reinforcing back here. You can also
put a dab or two of silicone, which is a good idea, some RTV sealant on the back here kind of
gluing it into the mesh as you combine it. That works as well. So that's how you get the badge
off the truck. That's how you get the light mounted in the badge just like that. Then you're going to
be putting the badge back on. The next thing is how do you get the wiring from the hole under the
hood. Our goal here is to get this wiring out under the hood and we want to get it out right through
that fender and up through the fender well. The way we're going to do that is there's a factory
plastic bulkhead between here and here from the factory. Now on higher trim lines, reach your arm down
in here because there's a big foam air stop in there, a big like gray kind of fabric air stop.
Pull that out of the way so your drill bit doesn't get all caught and spun up on that and I'm gonna
show you exactly where to drill. I like to open the door to the first detent. Don't open it all the way
because see how it closes access back there. So if you close it a little bit, you have a clear view
right here above the top hinge, you can see that's right by the mirror there, above the top hinge you
see that recess right there, it's about the size of a dime. This is plastic right here.
We can go ahead and the drill bit will fall right out of your drill like it did out of mine,
go ahead and drill right there and as you can see, that's going to go right through no problem,
and now that is going to come out right in the inner fender well.
You'll be able to take it right up to the auxiliary switches
and believe it or not, when the door is closed, you can actually easily put your hand in there
and reach around in there and feed that wire. Put your left hand into the fender and your right hand
in the hole, and you'll be able to feed the wire right through and then reattach the badge with
the longer wire extension on it and the wire will be out underneath your hood. You fold and put the
wire nicely tucked up behind the body panel there. Use a little bit of split loom, protect it, fabric
fuzzy tape, all that good stuff and when you put the badge back, that's how we make that happen. So
same procedure passenger side and then follow it under the hood to your auxiliary switches or to
your inside switch, whatever's your application, and go from there. So hopefully this was helpful. Thanks
again for watching Wicked Warnings. We're your number one source for construction and emergency
safety and strobe lighting and equipment, and make sure to follow all the links in this video to the
lights that we used in this project. Here's a quick shot of our Thin-X in the badge there.
Here you can see the side badge there. We elected a very fast alternating full flash amber-white amber-white.