Today we’re going to install a 20 inch light bar on a Nissan Xterra.
Here’s the light bar.
It is an Auxbeam.
I will link this down in the video description below.
Luckily for us on the Nissan Xterra, there’s a hollow spot right there on the bumper where
we’re going to stick the light bar.
It’ll just slide right there in that little groove.
It still has room for the mounting plates right below it.
To hook it to the bumper though, we’re going to remove the license plate holder.
And then this section of the bumper has about 6 bolts underneath, a few latches up here
at the top that you can just unclip and then this section of the bumper comes away.
So we’re going to mount the light to the top of this section of the bumper and then
snap it back into place.
The light bar comes with all kinds of cool hardware.
We have the mounting brackets down here at the bottom.
And we have 2 side bolts and their washers that go in either side to hold the mounting
plate in place.
And then you have a walking washer, a nut and a bolt that just stick down here through
the bottom and that’s what’s going to go through the bumper to hold it on.
You can see the light bar has different lenses for the different LEDs on the front.
These are more for flood and these for spots.
You get a wider angle from the sides of it.
So not all the light is concentrated in front of the vehicle.
And then the cable right here; you have to buy an additional wiring harness for it and
I’ll show you how that’s installed later on.
These little mounting plates down at the bottom, they can be moved left and right and then
tightened down with an Allen wrench.
This isn’t included though with the kit.
So this section of bracket can move up and down just depending on what angle you want
the light bar to be when it’s fully installed.
You can also flip around the bracket and have it be positioned so you can mount it straight
from behind as well, just depending on what kind of mounting positions you have available.
Lucky for us, there’s a perfect spot right here on the bumper for our light.
So what we’ve done is we’ve measured the sides, making sure that it’s centered completely
in the middle.
And then marked where our bolts need to go.
It’s going to bolt right here in this plastic ridge, and this is just marking the center
point.
So now that we’ve taken this chunk of bumper off right here, made the marks with soap stone
and figured out where the bolt needs to go down through and just pre-started drilling
the hole with the bit.
The front of the car here, this is where that section of bumper will flip up and attach.
We’ve cut two little holes here cuz there’s a metal bar down in here that isn’t too
far away.
So we don’t have a whole lot of room to work with.
And then right here we’ve hacked off the end of the bolt so that this nut will just
slip right down inside of this hole and then the whole thing will latch in these little
slots along the back and it will be mounted.
The wiring harness, it comes tied up in a little ball, and it’s actually pretty simple
to explain.
I’ll start here with the battery.
So with the battery connection you have the one black that’s tied into the relay; that’s
going to go on the negative terminal of the battery.
And then you’re going to have two red connections that will go to the battery as well; one’s
attached here to the fuse, and you want to take out the fuse before you start working
on anything.
And so these two red connections will attached to the positive terminal of the battery.
Now following the wires from the relay, you have the white and the red headed this direction
and what we’re going to do with those is there’s a little hole here in the firewall
right there.
And the black wire is going to go through that hole into the cab of the vehicle.
And that’s the switch that turns it on and off.
And coming from that, we have another black wire and it is just going to attach to any
screw that’s on the metal frame; it’s a ground.
Preferably a screw that’s not painted.
So you can see that screw down there has a wire attached to it so that’s grounding
something else and this ground can just stick on inside of that bolt as well.
So we’ll have two grounds coming off the same bolt.
Anyway, back to the battery.
Here’s that same relay with the black negative terminal battery connection.
It’s going to have two wires coming down that connect to the light bar.
Now this particular wiring harness has two connections.
So you can have two light bars.
It’s got a black and a white and then down at the other end it has a black and a white
as well.
And since the cable is only coming out of the two wires, it’s going to be the same
amperage whether you have two light bars or one.
So we’re just going to use the one light bar connection and it’s got the black and
the white right there.
And we’re going to take it over to the light bar which has the red and the black wires.
We’re going to go black to black and white to red and that should power the whole thing.
So we’re going to make sure that all fits up before we mount the light bar back onto
the bumper.
So our plan worked pretty good.
We got this section of bumper clipped in.
Our little holes for the bolts snapped in just nicely.
And we got the bottom section of this bumper all screwed back in and it is solid.
Now we’ll get that license plate cover back on and we’re good to go.
Alright so we’re testing out the lights right now.
These are just the normal headlights; obviously the camera doesn’t pick up all the light
it’s spewing out.
So here are the normal headlights and then we’re going to flip on the brights.
That’s with the brights on and then we’re going to flip on the LED bar; and that play
set is probably about 50 yards away and it’s lit up pretty well.
Can’t really tell with the camera, but it’s lit up as well as the trees on each side.
So now we’re going to turn off the regular lights leave just the LED light bar on.
So here’s the button from the cab where we went through the firewall.
So every time we click this it turns the LED lights off and on.
Quick little tip, if your light bar is blinking or flickering that means it’s not getting
enough power.
So make sure that the connections to your battery and the grounding connection are clean
and solid, and that should fix any flickering issues that you have with the lighting.
All of the parts, like the wiring harness and the LED light will be found in the video
description below.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments.
If you’re curious about this light bar that I installed on my truck, go ahead and click
in this corner to see how that was made.
I did some custom brackets on the sides.
And then I have another LED bar here that you can check out as well.
It’s one of the four inch spotlights.
Thanks a ton for watching, hope to see you around.