Installation Time
(approx) 1 Hour
Difficulty Level:
Simple installation for anyone.
Installation Guides
FREE 1 to 3-Day Delivery on Orders $119+ Details
Hey. Whats up guys? I'm Ryan from American Trucks and today I am here with the Proven Ground Grille with Ford Lettering and LED lighting fitting your 2009 to 2014 F-150 excluding the Raptor. It is gonna be for those F-150 owners that are looking for that aggressive styling of the mighty SVT Raptor to add to their truck. This grille is gonna change up the appearance of your truck giving you that off-road look that you're looking for without the huge price tag. The aggressive Raptor-inspired design will show the whole world that you have the number one truck in America. Now, this grille is made from durable ABS plastic and even comes with built-in LED lighting. The grille is an easy install and bolts on reusing the factory mounting points and the LED lighting splices into your headlight harness turning on with your parking lights. This whole thing comes as a complete kit and is one of your most affordable options on the site at around $250 and it even has great reviews from happy customers. As far as install goes I'm gonna give this a one out of three wrenches on the difficulty meter since you can install this in about an hour using basic hand tools. Now with that being said let's hop into the install. So the first step, we're gonna pop our hood so we can access the hardware underneath. So to remove this grille, it is bolted to these brackets here and the hood. We're going to start with these 10-millimeter bolts, you're gonna have one on both sides. We're gonna use a 10-millimeter socket to remove those. So next we're gonna to use a 10-millimeter to remove the six nuts that are holding the grille to the hood edge. So at this point in time, the grille is pretty much free. We will need to pull the hood down and just pry up gently and off to remove it from the hood. Now you can use a trim panel removal tool or anything soft and plastic to get in between the grille and the hood and pry it off the rest of the way. So we finally got our stock grille uninstalled. We're just about ready to install this new grille. It's a relatively easy install, all we have to do is switch over a bracket and do some pretty straightforward wiring. Now while I have these two in front of me, I wanted to take a second to go over some of the features, benefits of this aftermarket grille compared to the stock grille. Now the stock grille I think honestly is a good looking grille. However, I'm not a huge fan of chrome. I know some of you out there are but for those of us that wanna tone it down a little bit, get a little more aggressive look, I think that this grille is a great upgrade. This grille is made of durable ABS plastic. ABS is known in the automotive world for being a lightweight, durable, and impact resistant material. So this is really gonna hold up well and handle any debris that you may encounter. Now the next thing you'll notice is this has a wide open honeycomb design. This is a great design. Personally, I think it looks awesome and it's actually wider than the stock grille. So this is gonna provide you with plenty of airflow. Now, this has the Ford lettering already installed. We've offered grilles such as this before. However, you've had to outsource those letters and install them. These already come pre-installed and that way you can rep the brand that you are proud of. This has three bright LED lights that are already pre-installed taking out some installation time. Like I said these are relatively easy to wire up as they come with the wiring harness, we just have to tap into two wires to power those up. So with that being said let's switch over this stuff, get this installed, and show you how it looks on the truck. Now your new grille comes with all brand new clips and hardware installed. The only thing we have to do is remove this grille brace. This grille brace is held on with six bolts and we're gonna use a T20 Torx to remove all of those. Once you get those screws out, take your brace out. All right. So once you swap the old grille out for the new grille, we're ready to reinstall this brace. It's relatively simple. We're just going to place this on top. Same way that we took it off of the old one and then we'll just reinstall out screws. So once you have all these screws in, we're ready to tighten them up. I recommend using a wrench or a driver. Don't use a power tool because we might strip the holes out. We're gonna use that same T20 Torx to tighten them up. So we're gonna install this grille. You're going to have these clips up here. These are going to have to seat down through here in the hood and then, of course, we'll have to get these bolts to go through the bolt holes. So we're gonna spin this around and get those clips started. So all those are clipped in and we can install the new nuts. So like I said, we're going to take the brand new nuts that they provide us and we're gonna install those starting with these six studs up here. We're gonna use the 10-millimeter socket to tighten those up. So after you get all those six nuts installed, we're gonna reinstall using the factory hardware these two bolts up here for the grille brace and we're gonna use a 10-millimeter to tighten those up. And then we'll install this other one on the other side and then we can get to our wiring. So with the grille fully installed, the next thing we're gonna do is wire up these lights. Now like I said, you get a long wiring harness with three connectors. First thing we're gonna do is plug those connectors into our lights then we're gonna route this harness down the hood, most likely underneath the quilt to keep it away from any hot and moving parts and then we'll tap into our headlight wiring harness. So I'm gonna take the wiring and I'm gonna go through this hole over here in this bracket. Once you get that through, we're going to zip tie this excess up making sure that it stays away from the latch. So the next thing we're gonna do is take these two push pins holding the hood quilt in, we're gonna pop those out and then run this harness behind them. So I'm gonna use a trim panel removal tool to pop those out. Once we get those out, we are going to pull this away slightly and then we'll drop this down behind there. After that, we can reinstall these. Now to power these lights up, we'll need to tap into our parking lights. To do this and to access that wiring, we're gonna remove this front headlight on our passenger side. We're gonna use a 10-millimeter socket. You're gonna have two bolts up top and one side bolt, then we can pull that out and get to the wiring. Once you have those three bolts out, we're gonna go ahead and pull this light out. So we removed our headlight to access the wiring harness, we cut that open. Now we did not find the wire that we were supposed to. The instructions call for the yellow wire with a green trace. We were not able to find that wire so we tested the wires and we found that ours had a purple wire with a white trace. This is the 12-volt constant that turns on with the parking lights so we're going to tap into that. I would recommend taking a test light and testing for a wire that has a 12-volt constant when you turn your parking lights on. So now that we have these wires accessible, we're going to run our harness down there and we're gonna use these supplied scotch locks to tap into those. So we're gonna go for our black wire. The black wire is going to be the ground and what you're gonna do with these little locks is you're going to slide these onto the wire like this. That's gonna go on this front slot right here and then we're gonna take the other wire and we're gonna slide that into the back side of this. Once you slide that in, you wanna make sure that this wire bottoms out, that way when you press this splice down, it's gonna cut into both wires. So now that we have that in place, we're gonna clamp that down and once you get that all the way in, you just wrap this tab around and that's going to click shut and hold everything together. Sort of feed our wire into that and then same thing, that's gonna slide into there. We wanna make sure that is all the way in there and then we can crimp that down. All right. So we're gonna zip tie this excess wiring up using the provided zip ties and then we're gonna put our light back in. And this is just gonna slide back in place and then we can use that 10-millimeter to reinstall our screws. Once you have everything put back together, you'll wanna zip tie all that excess wiring out of the way and then you're ready to close your hood. So that's gonna wrap up my review and install. For more videos like this, check us out at americantrucks.com.
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Installation Info
Installation Time
(approx) 1 Hour
Difficulty Level:
Simple installation for anyone.
Installation Guides
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