FixBroke: Wiring the Subaru aux lights, part 8: final connections

Are you excited? I’m excited. All this work and still no light. Perhaps we can fix that.

I needed to first add the connection points for the spot lights and magnetic spot light to the fuse and relay box. The spot lights, with their combined 22 amps of current, would use one of these big Anderson connectors, while the magnetic spotlight and its measly 7 amps would use a miniature version of it.

These are a bit tricky and potentially dangerous to install. First, the wire is tinned - which entails giving it a thorough dosing of solder. With the wire tinned, these little terminals are heated and filled with molten solder. A good torch is needed for this.

With the solder still molten, the tinned wire is jammed into the terminal and allowed to cool. The dangerous part is that they tend not to go in smoothly, which can make the molten solder splash outwards with hot liquid metal. It hurts. Thankfully, when I learned this lesson, no metal reached eye level. Yes, you should wear glasses while doing this.

With the terminals soldered on and cooled, they are jammed into the plastic housing. They fit into place with a satisfying click.

One of these connectors is attached to the lights, and one is attached to the fuse box (with a rubber cover protecting it from the elements).

The smaller Powerpole connector used for the magnetic spot light works much the same way, but they are held on with a crimp instead of solder, and hence are much less painful. They are, however, much harder to put the terminal in the connector due to their tendency to distort when crimped. Sorry, no pics of that process, but here is the small cable for the magnetic spot light assembled and installed in the fuse box:

This is taped over for now, but will be plugged into the magnetic spot light when it is in use.

The last thing to connect is the fog lights. I decided that I’d rather not try using 8 gauge wire for these, as 10 gauge would technically suffice and be much easier to work with. It would mean buying more wire, but I was willing to pay for the ease.

Here is the fuse and relay box with all the wires now connected. The 10 gauge fog light wire is in white.

Stringing the wires through to the fog lights required their removal with some careful fishing through the myriad of holes between the bumper and frame. I took extra care not to run the wires around any sharp metal that could eventually chew through the insulation.

With the wires strung down to the fog lights, something in the back of my brain told me to double check that the fog lights were capable of being switched negative.

With the light open, you can see that the black (negative) wire is directly connected to the bulb, which is connected to the light body, which is connected to the bumper metal, which is (indirectly) connected to the negative battery terminal. Damn. I guess I would have to rewire for switched positive, as these lights would unavoidably have a constant negative.

A quick and final disassembly of the fuse/relay box relocated the fog light negative wire off the relay to a constant negative, and the positive wire was routed to the relay.

Down at the lights, I decided to forgo the Subaru ABS connectors due to lack of space and lack of need. I instead just used regular female quick connects to connect to the spade terminal already on the fog lights. As with all of the higher-amperage quick connects on this project I both crimped and soldered them for minimal resistance. This required removing the terminal insulation, crimping:

Then adding solder with a mini-torch:

Followed by a layer of heat shrink tube once it had cooled enough to slide it on.

I ran the wires down to the left side fog light and then across the bottom of the radiator to the right side fog light, zip tying the wires to the existing wires that run across there.

With those final connections, all the lights were attached and operational. I won’t show you the light output just yet, however - you’ll have to read the next chapter where I’ll be giving these lights the aiming they require.