Tutorial: Installing Fog Lights + Replace Your Shifter

I stumbled across some cheap fog lights the other day that also happened to be blue, which matches my blue interior LEDs. On a whim, I bought this kit, never really having worked with electricity before at all. I have to say, it was the best first time learning experience dealing with electrical accessories and was straight-forward and clear.

The finished product looks amazing and I look forward to doing more cool stuff like this in the future.

I'm going to try to write this tutorial as simply and as clearly as possible and I'm going to show you the relevant pictures right off the bat. First of all, have a look at the finished button set up. Yes, the kit comes with a button that you have to get from under your hood to your car somehow. It will be immediately apparent how I did it. Let's check it out.

Most of the wiring sits under your hood. Use zipties to creatively hook them up. You don't want loose wires under the hood. Read closely.

There are three wires as you can see going to my button. Red (green in my case; I had to extend it) is the power - it hooks up directly to the positive terminal on your battery. Just undo the nut a little, push the U-shaped connector onto the bolt, and tighten the nut to hold it there.

Before you do anything, disconnect the negative side of your battery.

Anyway, there is also a long white wire. I will explain what that is for in a moment. The button as well as each light has a black wire. The black wire is the ground wire or negative. You have to connect these to a bolt that touches the body directly in order to ground each component. I will explain a little better below.

Don't get confused now. The white wire is what supplies power to the fog lights when you flip the switch. See what I mean?

It's like this. The button part has three connectors. It is connected to the main power source - the battery - through the red wire. But it's not constantly flowing.

When you press the button, that opens a circuit allowing power to flow to each light through the white wire. This is provided that the circuit is complete which means each piece, again, has to be grounded. The button itself has to be grounded. There just happens to be a bolt that connects to the body near where I placed mine.

Let me explain grounding a little better. The ground wire is the negative wire which is essentially a means for the electricity to flow because there has to be both positive and negative. If you look at the picture above, there is a small bolt connected to the fender. I was able to unscrew it just enough to stick as much of the round black wire connector as I could under the bolt before tightening it back down.

It doesn't have to be perfect - it just has to have contact. The round connectors are meant to actually slide onto a bolt but they're too small so doing the same thing for both lights worked aswell. In that case, there is a bolt close to both headlights that is part of the radiator support and it's in the perfect place to ground your lights.

I know I'm all over the place but bear with me. Actually - whatever fog lights you buy will probably have instructions. Mine did.

At this point you're nearing completion. You have all the wires hooked up to your button. They're all similar but my button had the bottom connector for power (red), middle connector for the white wire which connects to the lights and supplies them with power when the button is 'on,' and the top connector was for the ground.

You shouldn't have your red connected to the battery yet. We wanted to ground the lights first. Make sure the bolts you used are tight enough so the black wire connectors are securely connected and also make sure the bolt you use touches metal, not plastic, or it won't be grounded.

Go ahead and plug in the white wires coming out of both fog lights to the main white wire which should have two places for the connectors.

So the three components are grounded, everything is hooked up correctly, and secured under the hood - go ahead and connect the red line to your positive battery terminal. Just loosen the nut enough to slide the U-shaped connector on to the bolt part of the terminal and tighten the nut back on.

In my case, the kit came with a fuse that is part of the red wire.

I forgot to mention. You should mount your brackets and lights first before doing all of this. That way, when you're hooking all your wires up, the lights are sitting there ready to be plugged in.

Make sure the wires are long enough before you start. If not, lengthen them by properly connecting a longer piece of wire and wrapping the exposed metal in electrical tape. Duct tape, even - don't leave any metal exposed like that! Your circuit might not work at all if it's sitting on the body or something, grounding out prematurely.

On.

Off.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that if your shifter is falling apart, get a new one. I found this one at the junkyard and it's in almost perfect condition and is an awesome black leather with nice stitching.

It really changes the feel of operating the car. Hope you guys find this tutorial useful - I'm out.