Clearance Lights

[FDCChief]

Does anyone have experience installing clearance lights? Any tips for the first timer? My sheet metal is perfect, and drilling holes in it will be something I only want to do once! Are there problems with leaking? Also, any benefit for LED over lamps?

Thanks!!

[LMJD]

It's a simple operation. Just get a good commercial heavy truck name brand, not what the cheezier parts houses carry, that way the mounting gskts will last forever and never leak. Signal Stat, Grote, Trucklite, are 3 of the quality lines that come to mind. Napa carries at least one of those brands if not all in many sizes and styles. LEDs don't use hardly any juice, but the small regular bulbs don't use too much either, choice is yours. Space them out on the cab roof like you want, then use a mounting gskt to mark and centerpunch then drill the holes. Pull the headliner down, pull the left interior windshield pillar plastic trim. Fish "baling wire" (mechanic's wire Napa calls it) up from the left kickpanel or down from the cab roof holes, whichever's easier, then tie the electrical wire to the end of the baling wire and pull it through. Wire/splice to lites and taillight circuit off liteswitch as required.

[rotaryboots]

My cab lights where simple 1 wire pos and base ground so it was a matter of just stringing all the light's pos wire together to one pos wire down near the pillar and to my tail light power. When I dropped my head liner down there were a couple holes already in the first layer of metal so I was able to get all the wires together rather easy and I tucked the excess wire back up into the space between the headliner metal and cab metal area. Maybe this is hard to explain in text but you'll see what I mean when you go at it.