Ford Super Duty
Puddle Lights
2004 F250 4x4 XLT Sport Crew Cab 5.4L
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My Dad's 2002 Explorer has what I finally learned are referred to as "puddle lights". Small lights mounted to the bottom of the side mirrors that come on when the interior lights are on. They are most helpful when parked in a dark area, just hit the unlock button and they light up the area around the side of the vehicle.
So, I decided to try to install something similar on my F250.
After searching for quite a while, I found these accent lights from superbrightleds.com, part number AM-OB-WW6. They are small (0.75" x 1.09" x 0.30"), low profile, and waterproof. They have six surface mount LEDs which are known to provide a lot of light.
The first step to installing these is to sort out where to attach them to the mirror. I originally planned to install them directly under the mirror glass like the Explorer, but I chose to install them under the mirror housing, closer to the body of the truck. This greatly simplified the wire routing.
Before removing the door panel, be sure to open the window so that you can stick your arm through there to grab the mirror while you're removing it.
Next, remove the door panel. You can see the step by step of this in my courtesy lamp writeup.
Once the door panel is off, its time to remove the mirror. Start by disconnecting the mirror harness connector and feeding it back into the door.
Then remove the two large rubber plugs. You can leave the middle plug in place.
Then, remove the four bolts using an 11mm socket. There's two obvious ones on the right, and two hiding (red circles) under the black liner.
Now with the mirror removed, the hole for the wiring can be drilled. You might notice that the mounting location of the LED module doesn't match the final location shown at the end of this writeup. As expected, I had to tweak the location a bit. I originally thought it would help to have them angled rearward a bit but it turned out that was a bad idea. I adjusted them to pretty much just point straight down.
Anyway, this pic shows the hole in the mirror housing for the wire. Note the shrink tubing to protect the wires and to hide the red one.
I also drilled a small hole in the mirror structure to allow the wiring to pass through. Otherwise it would've been pinched between the mirror and the truck body. Again, a little heat shrink was added for protection.
Next, reinstall the mirror and rubber plugs, then fish the wiring harness back up out of the door and reconnect it. The wires that came on the LED module were long enough to get to this point, but not long enough to connect to where they needed to go. So, I soldered and heat shrinked a couple short wires to them to finish them off.
I attached the ground wire to the the same speaker mounting bolt that I used for the door courtesy lamps.
Since I had those courtesy lamps installed, it was super easy to just connect the positive lead of the LED module to that same wire.
For those who haven't installed courtesy lamps, you'll need to pull the kick panel and run the wire through the door "conduit" and tap into the black/blue wire in the door sill area. This is also covered in the writeup a linked above.
Finally, reinstall the door panel and you're done. The passenger side procedure is exactly the same.
I tried to get a picture of how well they light up, but I couldn't. They light up a really wide area around the side of the truck though and the result is exactly what I was looking for.
Here's a few pictures of the finished product.
Questions or Comments? Email jmray@frontiernet.net