Raxiom 23.30-Inch Slim LED Light Bar; Flood/Spot Combo Beam

Video Review & Installation

Ryan: The Raxiom 23.3 inch Slim LED Light Bar in the flood and spot combo beam is for those of you that have a 1987 all the way up through the most current model year Wrangler that are looking for a slim and compact LED light bar to add some auxiliary lighting to your Jeep. Now a bar of this size isn't going to have a specific mounting location. What I mean by that is a 50-inch light bar always goes above the windshield. That's really the only spot to put it, and there are a ton of bolt-on brackets to get it mounted there. Those smaller pods, they can go on a bumper, a bumper hoop, up on the A-pillar as reverse lights. Something like this you're gonna have to be a little bit more creative with where you mount it, or you're going to have to have a bumper for instance that is specifically designed for a light bar of this size, that has a cut-out and that has mounting brackets for it. If you don't purchase a bumper that has specific mounting brackets for a light bar of this size, you're probably going to have to drill some holes in order to get it installed. Now speaking of the installation, we're gonna go with a two out of three wrenches for this install, mostly because of the things that I just mentioned, the fact that you most likely will have to drill some holes to get this installed, and the fact that this just has a two wire pigtail on it, does not come with a wiring harness, so this is going to require you to have some sort of wiring knowledge in order to get this hooked up. Now Raxiom does offer a wiring harness that you can purchase that will make that process much, much simpler for you, so make sure that you pick that up if you want to make the install a little bit easier and you're not into building a full harness on your own. But what we are going to do is show you how to get this light bar installed in just a minute, so that should certainly help out. Now light bars are sort of all over the spectrum when it comes to price and quality, and those two things are pretty closely connected when we're talking about lights. So there are those bargain basement priced lights that you can find on some of the online auction sites where you can get a whole bunch of lights and brackets and wiring harnesses and everything for 100 bucks, and then there are the lights out there that are going to be $1000 or more just for one really high-quality light bar. And the differences that you're going to find are not so much in the style and the look of the light, they're all pretty much gonna look the same, but what's inside, the electronics, what type of LEDs are included, how waterproof the housing is, and are you going to get any sort of condensation behind the lens, if you're gonna get individual LEDs burning out. All of those things come into play when you're talking about the price, as well as the optics and the reflectors that are in the light, so how controlled is the light, how focused is the beam, and how far are you going to have the light thrown in front of you? So again, all those things come into play when you're looking at lights, and then those are all the things that are usually very closely tied to the price of the light. This light bar is gonna run you right around $75, which I do think is a pretty fair price for a bar of this size. I think that Raxiom does a really nice job of being right in the middle as far as price and as far as quality goes. So you're gonna get something that's very high quality here. This light bar may not throw light down the trail quite as far as a light bar that costs twice as much for the same size bar. It may be a little bit less focused than some of those really high-end premium companies that you're gonna spend a lot more money on. But, for what it is and for what it's priced, I think it's a really nice balance of quality and of cost. This is going to be an aluminum housing, it's going to have five-watt CREE LEDs on the inside of it. It is that combo beam, so it's going to be a little bit of a flood beam on the outsides here and then a little bit of a spot in the center there. So it is going to give you a little bit of both throwing light in front of you and also lighting up the gutters on either side. Because this is a single row bar, it's going to have larger LEDs but less of them than those double row bars, to still throw a ton of light but be a little less flashy. It's gonna be a little bit slimmer, so it gives you a little bit more of a sleek look in my opinion. So, gonna be a really nice bar for those of you that are looking for something that you can put into a custom location, or if you have purchased one of those bumpers that accepts a light bar of this size, this is going to be a really nice choice. So I mentioned before we're gonna show you how to get this installed. We'll do that now. Male: Tools used for this installation are as follows. We have a small nut driver or ratchet, a wire stripping tool, a 10-millimeter socket, the Allen keys that are supplied with your light bar, some wire, a small toggle switch, and some butt connectors. All right, now we're ready to mount up our new 23-inch light bar from Raxiom on our Jeep Wrangler. And to do that, we're gonna go ahead and mount it here on the front of our off-road bumper, and I'm actually gonna mount it underneath our stinger bar here. Why? Well, personally I think that that's just a little bit better place, a little bit better protection, you know, if a tree branch comes along here, it's not gonna knock it off the top. So I think underneath here is gonna look really good, and then I'm gonna show you how to wire it up. Now I went ahead and loosely installed our side brackets onto our light bar. That way I can go ahead and get this mounted on the front of our off-road bumper, but I wanted to leave them loose, that way I had a little bit of adjustment while mounting them. Now I'm just gonna line up our brackets with the holes on our bumper, get the hardware installed. Now with our side brackets mounted to our bumper brackets, we're gonna go ahead and tighten those up using a 10-millimeter socket and the Allen key that is supplied in our kit. With those installed, I can go ahead and tighten up my adjustment bolts on the side of my light bar, also using the other Allen key supplied in the kit from Raxiom.Now with our new light bar installed on the front of our bumper, we can go ahead, pop our hood and I can show you how to get that all wired up with a toggle switch so we can have that at the flick of a switch anytime we need it. Now I'm gonna give you a quick rundown on how to do a little bit of wiring and how to get your new light bar wired up. Now I'm not going to show you how to mount the switch in the dashboard, because well, the switch doesn't come with this kit and the switch is completely up to your discretion. If you want to get yourself a switch panel with multiple switches in it for different lights or different accessories in your Jeep, I highly recommend something like that. Right now, what I'm gonna show you how to do is just get the wires from your light bar to your battery and on a switch. This way you can turn it on and off. Where you mount your switch is up to you. Which direction you mount your wires is also up to you. Now the way I like to run it is I'm gonna send my hot lead from the positive side on my light, which will be the red wire, to the positive side of my battery. Now I also highly recommend putting a fuse in this. You're just going to run that in line with a little fusible link, but I'm gonna show you how to run it directly for now. Now with our wires exposed here, I'm actually gonna trim a little bit more of the sheathing off of my red side, and then my new wire, I'm gonna take a little bit off of that and show you how to use a butt connector. So with a good pair of wire strippers, go ahead and strip back the covering on your wire. I like to twist the end before I install my butt connectors. Just go ahead and slide that over, making sure it is all the way down as far as you can go, and just tightly crimp the end of it, and give it a little tug just to make sure it's nice and locked in place. Now with our piece of wire that we had to supply ourselves, slide that in the other end of your butt connector, and do the same. Give it a little tug. Those are nice and tight. Now I recommend using a piece of heat shrink over these to make them nice and weather tight, but for now, we're just gonna move on. Now once you have all your wires ran neatly out of the way from anything that can burn them, cut them, slice into them, anything that can damage your wires and cause a short later in your system, we can go ahead and hook them up to our battery. Now to do that, I already stripped the end of my wire back, and I'm gonna use a small eyelet. Slide that over, and this crimps on just like our butt connector does. Now with a 10-millimeter socket, we're gonna go ahead and connect it to our battery. Now our positive side is done and we can move on to our ground side, and I can show you how to get that switch installed. Now I know a lot of you are gonna sit at home and look at this video and go, "Well, you know, that's not how it's really done." Well, there's many different ways to do wiring. This is the way that I like to do it. This is the quickest and simplest way for this video for me to show you a very simple wiring technique. There are other ways to do it. A lot of people will say you should put a relay in or you should put a fuse link in, and yes, a lot of times you should. But for a very quick simple installation, this is how it's done. Now personally, I like to put my toggle switch on the ground side. This way I'm not running power through the switch, which could potentially cause a short later down the line. Put a couple spade connectors on the end of my wires. Crimp them down into place. And on the toggle switch that I am using today, I'm gonna just connect it to the two flat pins on our switch that are gonna connect those wires together. Now on this toggle switch, yes it does have a third pin. That third pin is to actually light up our switch, but we're not gonna worry about that right now. With another eyelet on our ground side, we can connect this to our battery. Once again, with a 10-millimeter, we can remove the nut, place our eyelet on the ground side. That concludes the wiring for our light bar, and once again, you can mount your switch anywhere that you feel comfortable. You can get any switch that you want. If you like the larger toggle switch style, go for it. If you like the little switch panels that have all the different switches for the different lights, I highly recommend those. Those are great, they have a nice label on them, and they light up and they come with instructions on how to do all this wiring for you. Well, that concludes the install of our 23-inch light bar on our Jeep JK, and I hope you enjoyed this video and it gave you a little bit of insight on how to wire up a light bar and install one on your Jeep. For more parts and videos like these, make sure you give us a visit at extremeterrain.com.