SYLVANIA Brightens the Future of a 2010 Toyota 4Runner Project Backcountry Revival Part 3

We're back with our Project 4Runner here and as you can tell it's getting a little dark out here and although we are good with our light for driving on the road, we're a little lackluster when it comes to off-road because there are no city lights to help us out when we're out there. We have a few different Sylvania light bar and pod options and we're going to take this thing inside, we're going to go through those, we're going to figure out what fits our build best and we're going to get into how to install them and wire them into the vehicle. All right, well we got her back in the shop now and we're going to start looking at this bumper and where we want to put some lights. It's just a matter of what's going to look good and what's going to work good for their intended purpose. So as you can see we have a bunch of lights to choose from, we're not putting all of these on the vehicle, but we are going to pick a couple to go on and today we're going to start with one light bar and we have a few options here and a few you don't even see on the table as well as we have a whole bunch of pod lights that we can choose from. We're going to break them down like this, there's a few different series that Sylvania makes. They make a slim series, the compact design of the slim series allows you to install these lights almost anywhere. Then you move into your rugged series, the rugged series made for really getting bashed you know being out in the elements. The rugged series is waterproof and has the most durable construction to withstand rough environments and then we move on to the ultra series and the ultra series is where you're really getting the light. We're not trying to package it super small, trying to give it enough heat sink is what it looks like. The ultra series has the highest lumen output for ultimate visibility. So I really like these rugged series, I think they look real slim and nice. I like the square face, I like how small they are. This is 3600 lumen in a 10 inch light bar and then you move down here to the ultra and you're getting over 9000 lumens out of a 20 inch bar right there. So there's a lot to choose from, we got some more flood specific lights like this guy right here. The main difference between floodlights and spotlights is the beam angle. Floodlights have a wider beam to illuminate a larger area while spotlights have a narrow beam to highlight a specific area. We're going to see what kind of looks right, we'll talk a little bit about what we're thinking we're going to do and then in the end it'll probably be none of those things combined and we'll put some lights on this car. Let's see what this looks like, oh I might almost like that. This is over 9000 lumens, that is three times almost what the other light bar is and I have a feeling the people that drive this are used to having really nice lights on their cars so this is a really nice light. I think maybe we do this and add some rugged series down below it in pod lights so in case you don't need this much light or let's say it's foggy and you want just some light a little lower pointed at the ground, maybe we run those in a flood type of light. I'm gonna think about it for a minute and then you're gonna see what I chose. Here's what we got going on, I looked at the tab we had, if you were in your garage and you had a you could cut it off and give a little bevel, it's just going to make the light bar real tight to the front bumper. So what I did was I made one that just adds a little bit of height to it, drew it in QCAD. I'm no expert, I've got maybe 10 minutes of training from my buddy Kendall over here on how to use QCAD but it's really just putting geometric things together and erasing lines and coming up with something. Really not that hard, it looks real daunting you deal with one of these plasma tables but it really isn't that hard. All right so we cut the tab, you can see all the slag off of it right here especially on the back which wasn't the cleanest cut but we're just going to tap it on some metal, clean it off a little bit and it should just pop right off and then we'll test fit it on our light and I gave it a little kind of half swoop here so we can weld it to the bottom of the actual deal. Oh watch this, this is how I'm going to clean it. So we got our tabs on there, we're going to try to get it as good as we can with the old icrometer here and then we'll clean up this bar and we'll tack weld this in. I think it's looking pretty good. All right we've tacked it in place, maybe we're within an eighth of an inch, it's kind of hard to tell. These look bent, Kendall says it's off, it looks on to me, you know is the bumper straight to the car? It's kind of a middle ground but it's definitely level, we have adjustment in it up and down. I don't want to pull on it too hard because we're just tacked but we're going to take the bolts out so we can get those rubber washers out of there, weld this thing, we'll touch it up with a little bit of paint just to protect it from rusting in the future. Sylvania also has tube mount clamp brackets for an easier way to install led light bars or pods. Now that we've mounted these where they go, we're going to start wiring them into the car. We're lucky because this already has pre-wired relays and switches for lights that are missing off of this car already, so all we have to do is go back to the relays and run a power and a ground up to each light and we should be good to go. Also make sure to verify that the gauge of wiring being used can safely support the power draw of the proposed lights. All right so when we're wiring stuff we want to use a relay. What a relay does is it uses a low amperage circuit to control a high amperage circuit. That way your switch isn't holding the amp load of the light that you're trying to operate and the way that works is you have four pins we really care about. We're not going to deal with 87A, that's connected until you energize the relay, but on pins 85 and 86 is a coil and that coil creates a magnetic field when it's energized and it sucks our switch inside of the relay and it connects it to pin 87. Pin 87 is what's going to run out to our light, pin 30 is the power coming from the battery through the fuse into the relay. So we can either ground or power control this magnetic field here and we do that in two different ways. Either we have pin 86 grounded at all times and when we give power to pin 85 it sucks the switch in or we can have power constant on pin 85 and we can ground pin 86 and then that will energize our magnet which will pull in our switch to pin 87 from pin 30. We're just connecting pin 30 to pin 87 whenever we have power and ground attached to pins 85 and 86. Sylvania does make these awesome little kits this one's for four lights so you can actually it's got a whole bunch of pigtails in there with one switch turn on four pod lights or rock lights or whatever you're trying to do with it or you have single ones they have remote control ones button controlled ones there's so many options out there and this really really simplifies it. Now we've gone over what a relay does what we have in this car because it has been to SEMA before and it's had lights and racks and you know stuff to sleep in it everything's been in this car before water pumps and whatnot we already have a switch panel here so we have a whole bunch of open circuits here that we can use that already have switches in our dash so there's no reason for us to go back and rewire the entire car. These are Deutsch plugs they have a lock that goes in them once we're pinned we just want to make sure we either have a good connection with connector or just butt connect them and leave yourself some extra service loop so if you need to take the bumper off and you don't want to take the light off you can just cut the old butt connector out of there and when you come back you have enough extra loop that you can pull it out strip it back and butt connector it back together it throws light to here so that's going pretty broad out there on a flood and now watch the center that is bright up there those look pretty good well we got the interior lights and the exterior lights all updated and bright and shiny you can see yourself in the mirror you can find stuff on the floor people can see your brake lights this light bar is putting out some serious light and those pods are giving us a great flood to be able to work in if we're winching or doing something like that i'm super excited to see how these sylvania light bar and pods does out there in the field in a few short days we've been able to really take this thing update it not to mention we got a full paint job on it there's no more bashed insides bashed in roof it's really come a long way that's not to say it doesn't need a lot more love but for now it's at least respectable in a parking lot when you come upon it wow these lights are super bright and i can see a lot more the motor trend team are going to be very happy with the lighting upgrades to this forerunner