Simple wiring work & $70 in parts adds extra turn signals to your F-150.
LED tailgate light bars have gotten to be very popular among F-150 owners, but many of these accessory lighting setups only function as parking lights or brake lights. However, F-150 Online forum member Digitalamish put together a great DIY thread that explains how to easily make those extra LEDs flash with the turn signals in a plug-n-play format.
Project Introduction
When the OP first introduced his simple F-150 tailgate LED light bar DIY, he got right to the explanation of how to make aftermarket light bars function in the same manner as your factory taillights. He started by sharing a picture of the light bar serving strictly as parking lights, followed by examples of the LEDs blinking brightly with the turn signals (below).
Left and right! You can do this mod, even if you are chicken of doing electrical. Here is how (sorry I didn’t grab pics while I was installing, it went too quick!).
Project Products
The OP didn’t make a list of the things that you need to perform this simple DIY, so we went ahead and put one together.
2 – 28-inch LED strips (the OP purchased them online for about $65)
1 – Trailer-Side four-pin plug
1 – Wire stripping tool
4 – Wire connectors
4 – Heat shrink connection wraps
The Simple Instructions
In most cases, we summarize the DIY, but this project is so simple that we have included the entire rundown of the project instructions below:
Strip the wires on the LED bar, and strip white, green, and yellow on the plug. Ignore Brown. Run one wire from each led bar to white (ground), and one bar to yellow, one to green. Plug it in and test. If for some reason they don’t light up, switch the white and colored wires to the led strip.
Once the wiring is done, you just plug in the new harness to the factory four-pin trailer plug at the rear of your truck and these LED light bars will light up in the same fashion as your taillights – providing braking lights, parking lights and turn signals.
The downside is that if you use the four-pin connection for a trailer that you pull with your F-150, you will need to unplug your LED light bar setup when towing a trailer, but if you tow with the seven-pin connection – as most larger trailers do – this DIY simply makes use of an otherwise-unused connection.
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