Stand out on the roads with showstopping under-car LED lights
These LED light strips might not make our host Anatalia Villaranda's car go any faster, but they sure do add flair to this souped-up ride.
Video Transcript
ANATALIA VILLARANDA: What's up, y'all? I'm Anatalia Villaranda. And this is "In The Know-- Glow Up Garage," where I show you how to do simple DIY car upgrades for an epic glowup. And today, we're going to be installing lights under your car. Ah! I'm so excited for this. This is going to elevate your ride, pimp your ride a little bit, and just make your ride look a lot more cooler. It's super easy and simple. So let's get into it.
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The tools you'll need are-- alcohol wipes, adhesion promoter, 60-inch exterior adhesive LED strips applied to the sides of the car, 24-inch exterior adhesive LED strips applied to the back and the front of the car, a smart hub and their extension cables and adhesive pad, 12-millimeter socket, and a 3/4 ratcheting wrench. If additional security is needed, we can always use mounting brackets and screws. And last but not least, zip ties.
OK, guys, let's get into this. Even if you don't have a car lift, you can do this at home. It's super doable. All you need is a car jack. The most important part is making sure that you place your LED strips in the correct placement. You got to find the placement on the car where it is going to stay dry. And that is where we're going to start with alcohol prep and primer.
OK. So first, I'm going to put some gloves on just because the underneath of the car is a little dirty. And I just want to make sure we don't get any bad chemicals into our skin or our fingers or whatever the gunk is. But the first thing that we need to do is find the placement for the front LED strip, which is going to be right over here. And before we do any, any, any, any placing of the strip, we have to make sure the surface is clean. So we're going to start with alcohol prep, then after that, do adhesive promoter. So we make sure it's dry, clean, and that 3M really sticks on.
So now we're going to grab our alcohol prep. It's a little tiny square, but it does the job. And we're just going to clean the surface, especially where we're going to put the LED strip. You don't want any oil or coolant or just gunk sitting there because then the 3M tape won't hold. And we have to make sure that this alcohol dries before we put that adhesive promoter on so that all of this will be clean and ready to go to put the LED strips on. Now we got the adhesive promoter. Take this out. It is a bigger cloth. And I did wipe this before, and you'll see that there was still a little bit of gunk on it. So it's good that we're cleaning it again with the right materials. Look at all that gunk.
OK, so now that it's all dry, we have the LED strip right here. But before we place it anywhere, we want to make sure that we're placing it the correct way. In order for all the LED strips to work, the wiring has to be correct and not tampered with, especially when the car is on and running. So when we place it over here and we remove the adhesive cover, we have to make sure that this wire is going to be prepped to be connected to the next wire, to the next wire, to the LED strip, and so on and so forth.
This particular wire is going to be connected right over here, kind of sort of next to the fuel lines. And then we'll go ahead and zip tie them so they're gone and not in the way of anything, and also don't get ruined because that would be bad. I just want to make sure that it's even and centered and a good placement. Dun-dun. And, boom, the first strip is on.
So now that we went ahead and finished the first LED strip, we are going to put two on the sides and then the one in the back. Two sets of hand are better than one. So I'm going to grab a friend. Now we're just going to go ahead and prep the whole car for the LED strip. So I'm going to take this alcohol wipe and then go move on to the adhesive promoter. This side is done. I'm going to let it dry, and I'm going to move on to the back and make sure that one's clean.
The last part before we put on the LED strips, adhesive promoter. The alcohol prep is dry. So that's why we're doing this now, to make sure it's extra, extra clean. A clean car is a happy car. So make sure you keep your car clean. OK, now that it's all cleaned and primed, we can now place the LED strips and adhere them right onto the side skirts.
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Now that we laid all the LED strips all along the car, we now got to connect the wire to each LED strip straight through the trunk to the power source, which, in this case, in this car, the battery is in the trunk. So we got to connect it right through here.
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Thank you, guys, so much for watching "In The Know-- Glow Up Garage." In this episode, I showed you how to install glowup lights under your car. I love this glowup because it's really fun and simple and has such a cool end result. It might be a little bit intimidating, but you can totally do it. And the most important part is be safe and have fun. Bye, y'all.
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