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Everything But The Winch

Keystone19250

Keystone19250

SAINT
So during the last week I got all the kits to mount a winch on my truck, the winch will be ordered next week.
It was a long day.

It started at 7am as I laid out cardboard to lay on when working under the truck,
Then I got the kit parts and nuts and bolts laid out.

The truck before I started looked like this.
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Last weekend I removed the lights and the aluminum bar you can see between the tow hooks I installed to protect the radiator after removing the front license plate holder.

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This picture shows the bumper unbolted and hanging on the OEM tow hooks while I wait for my neighbor to help me take it off.

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OEM tow hooks removed and new bumper support brackets installed on the frame.

As the day wore on I forgot to take more pictures.

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Everything installed.
The lower grill guard cross tube has brackets welded on for a light bar and the winch carrier tray also has cutouts for LED cube lights as well.

As mentioned a long day as it took me
7.5 hours from start to finish.
 
Power cables routed this morning and connected to the battery, performed a quick power check and all is good.

Still need to do a steel cable pre-stretch per instructions.

I’ve ordered a cover for the winch as well as a polyester (tree saver) strap.
3 inch wide and 8 feet long rated at 30,000 pound break strength.
 
So as a follow up I’ve completed the Winch setup and installed all the lights with some changes on the front of my truck.
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Originally I had LED pod lights installed on the winch carrier tray that projected light through the opening’s cutouts but they provided poor light so I moved them to the grill guard cross bar and installed flush mount lights in the cutouts.

Of course never being truly done I evaluated the lighting previously installed and decided to make changes based on overall usage over the last couple years.

The first to go were the pod lights that were installed on the ends of the Thule bars on the roof, my initial thought was to use them as curb lighting but never used them.
 
Ok that was weird, couldn’t add more to that post……….
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Pod lights removed.

Next was to remove the front Thule bar and remove two of the lights, I also repositioned the bar light.
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That however will be re-centered and I’ll be using the bar space to the left and right of the light to to install steel plates, the steel plates will be used to hold magnetic mount antennas since the body of my truck is aluminum.

Although I still have some work to do while I wait for parts (steel plates) to be delivered there is one thing I needed to do.

As I mentioned before the install of lighting on the truck has been a 4 year work in progress having done all the work myself. I’m embarrassed to say that I found out that wiring in the lights I grouped the ground wires together for multiple lights causing “in two” of those groups to becoming very hot during usage. Hot enough to melt the electrical tape and could not be touched without burning my hand. Basically a fire just waiting to happen.

The fix…….

Since I’ve removed some lights I completely re-did the power (+) side (which never got hot) and also separated each ground wire and connected them individually to a ground block.
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The ground block is connected directly to the (-) side of the truck battery.
So far no heat whatsoever but I’ll be monitoring this for the next few weeks.
 
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