How long should it take to mount auxillery lights that came off of your old Jeep, to your new Jeep? It depends on the weather. It finally warmed up enough to get this done. 🙂 So I finally mounted my Baja Designs Squadron Sport Spot and Cornerning lights.
They’ve been sitting in my garage since I rmeoved them from my previous Jeep, so dusting them off was the first step, as well as spraying some electrical contact cleaner onto the wire connections. It was more work than I expected.
I mounted the lights onto the steel front bumper. This time I needed to mount them on my winch/grille guard (2″ tube). I didn’t want to spend $40 each for four Baja Design mounts, so I ended up buying some cheap aluminum mounts for $50 on Amazon for. I’m happy with the result.
Second, on my previous Jeep I used an sPOD device to manage all my under the hood switched wiring, I had to dig around under the hood to find the Rubicon’s AUX switch wiring bundle. Once I found it, it was a piece of cake. Ground wires went to a bolt that Jeep recommends for grounding lights (IOW not to the negative battery post).
The AUX wiring bundle includes four wires. The AUX 1/2 switches use 12 AWG wiring, and are rated at 40A. The AUX 3/4 switches use 16 AWG wiring, and are rated at 15A. The spot and cornering lights are 2A each, so I connected the spots to AUX 3, and the cornering to AUX 4. I can combine them later if I run out of AUX switches.
AUX Switch Wiring
Switched
AUX 1 (F93 - 40A) Brown/pink stripe
AUX 2 (F92 - 40A) Green/pink stripe
AUX 3 (F103 - 15A) Pink/orange stripe
AUX 4 (F108 - 15A) Blue/pink stripe
,------------+------------,
| Aux 1 (40) | Aux 3 (15) |
+------------+------------+
| Aux 2 (40) | Aux 4 (15) |
`------------+------------'
Unswitched
Direct Battery (F72 - 10A) Red/white stripe
Ignition (F50 - 10A) Orange/pink stripe
I’m a stickler for clean wiring, so I made sure the cables were cut with just enough slack. Then I used solder seal connectors to connect the wire ends, with heat shrink sleeves to make the connection even stronger. Then, to show how serious I am about protecting wiring, I covered the wiring with heat shrinkable braded sheathing.
Did I go overboard? Danged right I did. Heck, I even labled the cables so future me knows which cables go to which lights. Nothing is worse than not knowing where cables are coming from or going to. I prefer to do things right and not cut corners. Not sure a shop would go to such lengths, but I always try to.
Once the lights were mounted, and the wiring done, and the switches tested one last time, I drove a couple miles to the nearest Walmart. They’ve got light walls at the back of the store, perfect for testing. I parked perpendicular to the largest wall, about 50 feet away.
I aimed the spot lights so the center is level to the head lights. The cornering lights are almost impossible to aim, so I used the fins on the lights to get it as level as possible. Once I’m on the trail, none of this will matter, but I sleep better knowing I did my best.
I’m not quite done yet with lights. I need two waterproof LED strip lights. One for inside the iKamper Skycamper Mini roof top tent (RTT), and for under the awning. Luckily those are cheap at REI.
Overlander at large 