I wish a Merry Christmas to all you chevy owners out there! I hope there a plenty of Jegs, Summit and Rock Auto parts waiting under the tree!! You Ford people, i hope there is a nice new Chevy truck with a bow waiting in your driveway!

I have a 2003 Silverado 1500 Extended Cab 4X4 4.8L V8.

Hi All, First blog post ever so bare with me. Over Thanksgiving I added an underbody LED kit onto my truck. Went with a $35 kit on Ebay from China, really didn't expect it to be worth a hoot for $35, but I was pleasantly surprised when I received it. The only really ''cheap'' thing about it was the tacky remote on/off that came with it. Besides that the quality of the LED light strips themselves was rather amazing for $35! Very thick plastic channel with the electronics laid in, they then poured a apoxy/silicone resin into the channel to waterproof everything. If you're looking to purchase one for yourself search for "4 Car Flexible Underbody Underglow Blue LED Light Kit" on Ebay.

Attaching the strips was a bit of a challenge because they are very flexible. Unlike neon 'tube' style underbody kits they were not rigid enough to fasten without some kind of backing. I found some thin, scrap treated 1x2 lumber laying around in the garage and created mounting brackets to zip-tie these to.

Installation of the mounting strips
First I had to figure out how to mount these suckers. Each light strip for going down the sides of the truck were 48"s long. Each wooden mounting strip I made was approx 50"s. I also had to leave enough room to add the zip-ties when mounting the light strip to the wooden mount, so there would have to be space between the wooden mount and the body of the vehicle. I did use pilot holes and then metal screws to fasten the wooden mounts. I would recommend pilot holes especially in the wood so that you don't have to worry about splitting it. I also added a large fender washer to each metal screw so that it covered the entire wooden strip when tightened. By fastening the wooden mounts directly to the raised metal channels of the cab I left myself an inch or so of gap between the cab and the wood for the zip-ties. This also made the mounts face inwards instead of directly down, which in the long run looks much cooler considering they illuminate the frame also now.

Installation of the LED lights
Ahhhh, the tricky part, these light strips come with a 4-wire ribbon attached directly to each. These ribbon-wires then plug into the main control box through fitted plug-ins. On the passenger side of the truck I would not have enough of this ribbon to reach the control box mounted in the engine compartment (these underbody kits are made for those tiny rice-burner type cars... still don't see how there is enough wire even for them). My solution was to cut off the extra ribbon from one of the 36" strips that would be used in the rear (which there was no way that wire could have reached the engine compartment anyway) and then solder it to my current ribbon. Side note - Each of these ribbon wires are about 5' long. I could have used it, but it would have ran across the top of my engine and looked pretty bad. This way, with approx 9' of wire, I can run it along the back of the compartment and neaten everything up. Also, I realize I could have just added my own wire, but I didn't want a light under the rear of the truck anyway, this way the wiring is uniform throughout. I would definitely recommend using heat shrink and even some extra tape for this fix, being in the engine compartment means your patch will be exposed to the elements. The physical mounting of each strip is pretty simple. I used basic, black zip-ties I picked up at Harbor Freight for about $1.99 / 100pieces. They were cheap enough that I wasn't stingy at all with using extras during the mounting. Running the wires up into the engine took a little more thought though, and I ended up using existing wire and electric taping them together as I went. Hopefully this will eliminate any chance of it getting snagged on brush when off-roading.
The front strip was a little trickier considering I plan on adding a winch/front bumper in the next few months and I'll need to take it all down when I'm installing that. I have some chrome grill inserts on the front of the truck that offered me plenty of chances to mount the wood strip temporarily. This made the strip flex a bit, but I'm not worried about anything breaking. With a couple of washers and a 1/4-20 bolt each side of the strip was mounted and ready for the LEDs.

Installation of the Control Box
I ended up making my own mounting block out of some scrap Lexan. I went with lexan because I don't have much scrap metal laying around, and the mounting block I made looks pretty sharp being clear. I installed this lexan plate on the driver side of the engine compartment right next to the master cylinder. There are 2 grounding bolt there, 1 for the engine and 1 going to the hood. It was really handy to have these as I used them to mount the lexan as well as ground the control box. I made my mount large enough that I have room to add...

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had a good weekend out at Tay River Alberta took the truck out for a trail ride and it did great, i still would like some 33''s though
Great trails river was really high so it was a bit slooppyy....
heres my buddy dipping the bumpers on his stock rammy

I'll start out with the bad... I'm without my baby for 3 weeks or so while he's in the shop. The good... its in the shop to get almost completely repainted. Turns out the first time I took it down a gravel road with the new tires, it threw rocks all around my truck chipping the heck out of the paint. Insurance is covering it so I'm only out my deductible. Now I just have to wait a few weeks because the shop I use here in OKC is slammed. But while they have it apart I'm paying a little extra to have chip protector put on it and I also told them to leave the moldings and badges off!

I have had a can of Plasti Dip sitting around for over six months. After joining this site and learning what plasti dip could do, I ran out and bought a can so I would be ready one day! haha. I finally decided to break out the masking tape and paper today and plasti-dip the "GMC" on my front grill. So I started taping and rolling out the paper. I went way overboard with the masking because this was my first go-around with plastidip. The over-spray was actually very minimal (3 inches at most). I applied 4 light coats with 30 minutes between each coat, per the directions on the can. After the fourth coat dried, I removed ALL the tape and paper that I foolishly put on. (hey, next time I will know better ) So anyways, here are the results. I am pleased and will soon be doing the others to match.




Let me know what y'all think!