Suzuki Equator Forum

Has anyone installed one of these on the front of their truck? I know there are plenty of options out there for the Frontier, but since our bumpers are different, I don't know if they will fit or not. Can anyone verify this?

__________________

So, I still haven't been able to find any that fit. I contacted a few manufacturers who got back to me with very short responses of "no" or "I don't think so." Basically, they haven't tried and don't want to say yes.

I have been the guinea pig enough times with former vehicles, so I'm not going to do so again. However, I still want some driving lights.

I am looking into mounting them directly to the grill. This is my initial thought. The "post" bolt of the light will go through the mesh holes in the grill. Behind the grill plastic I will put a piece of flat bar with a hole drilled into it for the post to go through. This will provide more support than if I just tightened the bolt to the plastic grill.

Thoughts?

Here is a mock-up with 2 pieces of paper taped-up into approximate position:

__________________

Well, I broke down and ordered a Bull bar for a Frontier. I'll be sure to take a few pictures of the install, in case there is anything funny with the way things line up. I got the bull bar and 2x 6" Westin off road lights from eBay for $199/shipped. It's scheduled to be here on Friday.

__________________

I made a long post about this last night... but apparently it was sacrificed to the internet gods. This will be abbreviated.

I installed the bull bar - it is pretty straight forward. The only difference is the silver part of the Equator bumper has a little "bump" that doesn't allow the bull bar to be as upright as it would be on a Frontier. Since you can adjust it down, this is not really an issue.

The center valance needs to be removed. Most frontier owners discard it, I modified mine to fit. Just trim out the section that's already gone on the passenger side, and make a small notch in the backside so it can slide up over the mounting brackets. You do need to remove it to put the brackets on, but it can be reinstalled.

License plate needs to move. The license plate bracket is in the was of the cross-bar of the bull bar. I removed mine, then put it on the front of the bull bar using a metal hose clamp to tighten it up. Hose clamp is hidden by the plate, so no issue there.

Lights are like any other lights. I put mine on an on-off-on toggle, switched between parking lights and high-beams. So, if I leave the switch on high-beam, they automatically come on when I hit the brights. The lower position just turns them on, so long as the parking lights are on. That's not really about the bull bar though.

Finally some pictures:

__________________

Very nice, thanks!

As for the lost post the only way the post could have been lost is if you didn't submit it.................I've done it a couple of times and it sucks.

Now that's some serious lighting! Nice job. How's the view from behind the wheel with all those burning?

Lighting depends on how you aim them, I suppose. When I first got in to go drive to a dark empty road, they were pointed at the ground about 30' in front of the truck. I thought about leaving them like that and putting in yellow bulbs - that should've worked great for seeing in snow/rain. However, for legality I cannot have more than 4 bulbs lit on the front of the truck, so I would have to switch off the fog lights to use these lights.

Instead, I aimed them about level and straight out - to be used with high-beams. The difference between just high beams and high beams + driving lights is about equal to the difference between low-beams and high-beams. Should help me make sure now wandering deer want to surprise me. I thought about aiming them slightly out, to illuminate a wider pattern, but haven't had enough dark driving time to decide if I really need to do this or not.

The main reason I wanted a bull bar was to mount lights on it, and so far I'm happy with these Westin lights. The lights were part of a combo on eBay: bar + 2 lights = $199/shipped. Can't complain about what I got for that price (though 2 of the bolts that came with it easily stripped out, and I ended up replacing them with new hardened bolts).


Here are 2 daytime outdoor pictures of the bar. Don't be surprised if you see these again, the seller offered me $10 to send them a picture of the bar installed to use in advertising.

__________________

Again, nice set-up hyunelan2. Looks very professional and balanced for the Equator. How and what did you do for the switch for the lights?

The switch is a simple on-off-on toggle switch, available at any autozone/etc. It is mounted in the blank switch place next to the cargo light button.

In typical configuration, the switch has one input for power, and 2 load outputs (flip up to activate item A, flip down to activate item B.)

I did the reverse of this. I tapped a parking light into one of the load sides, and the high-beam into the other side. Then, the remaining post (normally input) goes out to the relay for the new lights.

So, what that does - if I have the switch flipped down, I turn on the parking lights and power passes from the parking light through the switch and onto the relay. If I have the switch flipped up, the source of power for the switch has to come from the high-beams. The middle position is off, obviously.

The relay wiring is all the same as it would be normally (ground the relay, apply a power wire to the battery (with fuse), apply the load wire to the lights, and attach the +12 switch wire.

I choose this setup because I knew I would want the lights to be primarily switched with the high-beams. But, I also thought that there may be a time when I wanted them on with just parking lights or low beams or something, so I have that option.

__________________

That covers all the options for sure. Thanks for all the feed back.