Diode Dynamics SS3 Sport LED Ditch Lights - Custom Fit - Combo Beam - Yellow Light - 1,930 Lumens

Video Transcript for Diode Dynamics SS3 Sport LED Ditch Lights Installation - 2023 Toyota Tacoma

Hello neighbor, it's Brad here at etrailer and today we're taking a look at installing the Diode Dynamics Stage Series Backlit Ditch Kit, specifically for 2016 to 2023 Toyota Tacomas. Now as far as light configurations, there's a few different options available, today, we have the SS3 Sports in yellow. This kit is going to allow you to mount up ditch lights on your Tacoma using the factory hood hinge spots. The bracket is really well designed and it's all made out of stainless steel, so it's gonna hold up long term on the elements and there's no clearance issues when you open up the hood or close it. It's gonna work with your SS3 like we have here today or your SSC2s. Now from there, there are quite a few different light configurations you can look at, whether it be for color or if you need to go to a brighter light, you can look at the Pro, where we have the Sport, which is still tons of light that it outputs.

And right now we have it on the backlit feature. So we have this nice amber color, but if we really need to illuminate where we're going at night, a simple flip of the switch is going to make these nice and bright with a 3000K yellow light. Now depending on the light that you choose, that's gonna determine the flood and as far as the beam's gonna go. So that's something you're gonna wanna take a look at. What is the best situation for the lighting that you want and then you can choose those lights accordingly The quality of these lights are phenomenal, really just everything you touch on them is really thought out.

And that also goes to the wiring harness that's included and that really makes it plug and play. A lot of other lights out there, you can buy those separately and then you have to do all the wiring and make it all work. Whereas this one, the harness is all there. It's already put together. So it really takes a lot of the guesswork out of getting these installed and that's kind of the great part is the wiring is a huge portion of light function and getting it installed on your vehicle.

So a nice harness that's really well made with good connectors is definitely key. Now something that stands out with Diode lights compared to anything else on the market is the optic that they use. So LED lights in general will really not be as efficient as possible without an optic in front of it and that's gonna channel that light exactly where it needs to be. And that's why these lights are so efficient and really get that light pattern exactly where you need so you get the most out of those diodes every time you turn those lights on. Now the fact that this is designed specifically for the Tacoma in that year range means that it is gonna be easy bolt up, the kit is super well designed so that way you're not having to get your own brackets and mounted up however you seem fit with the customization.

These ones truly bolt up and once they're tightened down, these things are super solid so that way when you're going down the road, you don't have those lights bouncing around. These I tighten 'em up, align them exactly where I want and they are not gonna move. The great part too is aligning it up. You have tons of different room to pivot that light exactly where you want it. You have up and down, you have a slotted channel here on the bracket that allows you to pivot it so you can really cover some wide angles or narrow beams, whatever you choose as far as lighting goes, these are gonna be a great option for you. To begin our installation, we're gonna start by grabbing our ditch light brackets and these are specifically designed for the Tacoma and they're gonna bolt in where we have our hood hinge here and we're gonna take these bolts out, bolt this in place, it should line up perfectly, but something that you need to take in consideration before just loosening that hardware is this can shift and that way the hood's not really gonna be aligned and there is some potential for damage just because this will be loose. So in order to prevent any of that from happening and also to give us a nice reference mark, I'm gonna take painter's tape and put it right on the seams and this is gonna really show us where we need to line it back up. So just kind of get this nice and tight in there. And then I'm gonna wrap a few small pieces around these edges just to kind of create a template of where it sits from the factory. So putting some painter's tape here on the fender, really anywhere where this hood could potentially get loose and make contact. This is a nice easy way to prevent any damage from occurring while installing your ditch lights. I recommend also getting the side specific bracket set up. On our driver's side here, this flat portion where we have the tab facing is gonna go right against this metal here once we bolt it up. And this is gonna kind of slide under here and then we can mount up our light. So just make sure that you have the proper one ready on each side. And then we'll grab a 12 millimeter socket and I'm gonna loosen up our first bolt and get that removed. (tool buzzing) And then when you go to this bottom one, this is when you're gonna wanna just kind of keep your hand on the backside to keep this from shifting. If you need a a friend to help you, that's not a bad thing to do because once we start loosening this, this is when it's really gonna wanna shift on us. Now while supporting the hood, we'll slide our bracket into place and we want this butted up against the metal. But really right now, we're just gonna try to get those bolts threaded back into place and we can fine tune adjust shortly after. So if you get one started just by hand, that's gonna be a good way to get your other one lined up. And then it's also gonna kind of hold your hood in place a little bit, get our other one in place as well. And before we tighten it down, get your bracket as far over as possible here and then also use those tape lines that we put to kind of get this lined up and then we'll get this snug down. Another thing you're gonna want to check is make sure that you have a gap between the bracket and your hood here. That way it's not making any contact and that's kind of our goal is to make sure that nothing rubs and causes damage to your vehicle while getting them installed. So now that we have our bracket tightened down, everything's looking nice and good, we'll grab our universal bracket from our fog lamps and get that mounted up. So we'll grab the universal bracket, making sure that it's facing, it's curling forward. So with this orientation, you also have the tab facing forward. We'll take the carriage bolt and feed it through our bracket and then through our ditch mounted bracket here. And then as far as hardware to get it started, we're gonna use a flat washer, a split washer, and then our nut. Now it's a little bit tight here so you may have to kind of, you know, finagle all your hand through here, but this is gonna make it a lot easier than doing it with the fog lamp mounted up, there's no really weight to this bracket. So for now we'll just get this hand tightened down to where it's gonna be slightly snug to kind of keep it in place. We are gonna be adjusting these a little bit later, so no need to get too crazy on tightening. Once you have your bracket loosely installed, you can go ahead and repeat the process on the other side. And once you get both your ditch mount brackets on your hood, you do want to probably lower the hood, check for any clearances, make sure everything's still lining up, and then adjust as necessary and alignment looks good. So at this point I'm gonna go ahead, I'm gonna close the hood and then we'll get our lights mounted up on our brackets. So to get the light mounted up to our bracket, we're gonna grab the nylon lock nut and you want the flat portion facing towards the outside and that's gonna drop in the slot here. This is a really cool design because it's gonna allow us to get this tightened down and not have to have two tools to accomplish that. And the nylon lock nuts do a really good job of making sure long term it doesn't become loose. Now making sure those nylon lock nuts don't pop out, we're gonna take our hex head bolt and we're gonna use a flat washer in between the bolt and the bracket. And I'm gonna get that started on both sides. And making sure that you have it in the proper orientation. The plug should be on the bottom side and the Diode logo should be looking as it does on the box, so we make sure that you have that in the proper orientation. Now before I get everything tightened down, obviously we have some adjustability. I like to plug it in to make sure that you know, we're actually adjusting for the light pattern, not just the look. So that way we can get all the functionality. So at this point, I'll open our hood back up and then we can start getting our wire harness ran. To get our wiring harness installed, first we're gonna grab the side that has the fuse holder with the red wire, our ground wire, and then also our relay and our battery's located on the driver's side. So we'll get that all hooked up first. And what we're gonna do is to get this nice and clean, you have this rubber cap on your positive terminal. I like to route our wires through that just to kind of keep it all hidden. And it's nice that normally on electrical connections, you have a ring terminal and that means you have to take the entire nut off in order to get this in place. That's not the case here. Ours is a split fork here, so that's gonna make it nice and easy. So we'll just loosen this nut here. It's gonna be a 12 millimeter socket to accomplish that, and just slide this into place underneath that nut, I'll get it tightened back down. Also making it nice and easy on us, our black wire's going to need to go to a ground and we have one from the factory. You can see I already have one of our, we have the reverse lights installed on here already, so we're gonna follow that same path. This is a 10 millimeter socket to get this taken off or at least loosened so we can slide that fork in there and once we have that in place, we'll go ahead and get that snug back down. (tool buzzes) We also need to get our relay mounted up and you can see our previous one, I put on this stud that was there. It's just a 10 millimeter socket to again get this taken off. And then we should be able to get both relays to fit on this same bolt. If not, there is some factory holes here. You'd probably need to source your own hardware to get that to slide in, but those also could be good spots. So we'll go ahead and we'll get this taken off and try to get our relay put in place. Now since we have two relays, you can do it this way. It's not exactly super clean. And I mentioned these two holes in order to get that in place, the hardware you need is an M8 by 1-1/4". The downside being that the bracket on the relay is a little bit too small, so you could enlarge that and get those mounted up nice and clean. You could do these at this angle, but if you are only installing the ditch lights with no other relays from Diode products, then you can totally utilize this. I'm gonna actually enlarge mine a little bit and get that mounted up on these spots. I think it'll look really clean. Now if you do go this option as far as mounting it here, what you can do to enlarge that hole is you can unplug the end part of the relay and I would recommend using a vice to kind of pinch that metal together as you waller that out a little bit to get your hardware to put in. And as far as the bolts, they bought 'em out pretty quickly, so some shorter bolts would definitely be ideal. I ended up using a nut. I also have a split washer and lock washer just to kind of keep 'em in place, but that nut's just adding the spacer. That way we can get this all tightened down. Now we'll go ahead, we'll get our two plug ends and we're gonna route these over to each of the fog lamps. Now these are equal distance as far as length goes, so we are gonna have some extra. But as far as getting our one routed over the passenger side, you can utilize, there's this factory wire loom that I actually had some previous stuff installed here that I just zip tied up. So this is a great way to run that over and get a nice clean look. And then when it comes to plugging it in the fog lamp, I'll show you how to do that. To get a nice clean run of wires, what I recommend doing is doing the passenger side, plug it in and then you can pull the slack back and there's a rubber piece here that goes from the windshield wiper cowl to the fender. And if you kind of peel that back, that's gonna allow you to pass that wire through there. And then it goes into where the hood hinge is. And right here there's also a gap that if you need to, you can pull this plastic push pin out, but you can feed that wire through here. And from here I just again followed all of that over. You can kind of tuck it up into the cowl, just make sure you have it zip tied up occasionally, that way it's not gonna fall down. But that's gonna give you a nice clean run. I did the same thing on our driver's side and we do wanna make sure that it's, you know, it should have room for that latch to go down, but you wanna leave a little bit of slack for adjustment. You don't need a ton, but you don't want that wire too tight to where you can't change the pitch or position of the light. So once you get it kind of routed up, I just took all my wires, I wrapped it all together, used some zip ties to get this nice and clean, out of the way, and from here you can test your lights to make sure that they work. So with the flip of a switch, I got my amber back light. And then the other side, I have my yellow projecting the lights up really well. So we need to mount up our switch. And this is actually fairly easy to pass through the firewall through a grommet to be able to get in place. But to accomplish this, to make it a little bit easier, we're gonna want to go ahead and separate this plug for now, and then we can go put this on the inside and I'll show you that grommet that we're passing it through. And that way you can get this pulled in. The grommet is gonna be located in the footwell of the driver's side and you'll see it's a large rubber plug and this one actually has quite a bit of space. So what I recommend doing is pinch off a little bit of a side and then cut a hole in it using either a utility knife or a pair of side cutters. You don't need to make it too large. You're basically just trying to make sure you can get that plug ran through. And once we're all done, we're gonna come back with a little RTD silicone just to kind of go that up to make sure it's water tight. But to get the plug passed through, the best way to do it is run a pull wire through. You can use something as simple as a large zip tie. You can use a screwdriver, I use air line tube and that way you can pass it from the inside into the engine bay. You can tape up that connector and pull it through. It's gonna make it a lot easier. Now normally I like to use a knockout panel and there's two different styles that I found on here, when I did my reverse lights, this one worked out really well. I just kind of had to notch it out a little bit using a 3/4" drill bit's gonna be a good size and there's a little notch there, but it just kind of presses in place. So I recommend starting on the smaller side and make sure that it just barely slides in 'cause then it'll lock in place. If you make it too large of a hole, it may not, you know, get in place perfectly. This knockout panel is slightly more narrow, so it's gonna be a lot more tricky to be able to get this in place. So what I'm gonna do are reverse lights. We're pretty much just gonna keep that in the reverse light function. So what I'm gonna do is use this same switch. Just make sure you keep track of your spade connectors and the way that they plug in. And this is gonna make more sense for ditch lights. And I'll just put our other switch for the reverse lights, just kind of tuck back here. That way we can still access it if we ever need to. But I think this makes more sense. And in order to get this in place, it's not terribly hard to modify. I just kind of trimmed out, I did a 3/4" and then there's a notch up top to keep it aligned, so just notch that out. And then once you get it in place, you can plug your spade terminals back in, that same configuration, main thing is the green one's in the center and then you'll have your switch wired up. So when doing this, obviously make sure that you get this plugged in to where you're able to slide the plug in place. So if you need to, you can run this plug through the opening and then you can snap it all in. And once you have all of your spade connectors can put on your switch, you can feed this up, kind of just tuck it under here. There's gonna be a nice large opening and we'll get this plugged in. And then with our excess wire, we'll just go ahead, we'll bundle this up, zip tie it so it's not flopping around. And then we can get our panel put back in place. So now that we know that they're working, everything's in place, we wanna make sure that we get these tightened down exactly where we want 'em. And obviously we have the two different points on the side to tighten angle up and down. But we also need to adjust side to side. So the best way I think to do this would be to go to a spot where it's dark and turn on the lights. And a lot of times if you use a garage door or a brick wall or something to shine at, you can get your cutoff line or at least everything lined up nice and clean if you have a reference point. So completely up to you how you want to set these up. You do have quite a bit of adjustment overall. So I'll kick on our lights and see where we want 'em. So I'll get this all adjusted up and then I can start tightening down. (tool buzzes) I got everything aligned exactly how I want it. So at this point we can pop our hood, get all the painters tape taken off, zip tie up any loose ends that you may have. And all that's left to do is start and enjoy your new ditch lights. And that was a look and installation of the Diode Dynamic Stage Series Ditch Mount Lighting Kit for 2016 to 2023 Toyota Tacomas on a 2023 Toyota Tacoma.