Benny's Xterra

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On my old Pathfinder I always had trouble seeing to back up. I find on the Xterra it's a little better, but not much. So I decided to add some backup lights. I found some by "Pilot" at Autozone that mount to the Hitch. Looking up here is the bracket as it is mounted to the hitch.



The light bracket is attached to t he hitch via tie wraps. I was sure how good this would hold but seems to be holding up OK. Another bonus could be that if I contact the lights during off roading the bracket may just rotate around rather than bending or breaking the lights. Here's how the two lights look on the back.



Next came the wiring part. The lights come with a harness that is intended to just tie into the reverse lights. The lights are 55W and with the two that's almost 10 amps and I was sure I wanted to run that way. So I decided to wire it diffently and run power straight from the battery through a relay. Additonally I wanted to have the lights switched. And I wanted a switch to swap between Off, On, and on with the reverse lights. With that I had to devise a new circuit. Here is the circuit diagram I designed.



To make this work I needed a SPDT switch rather than the normal SPST switch. Additionally, I wanted the switch to be lighted to tell me the status of the lights. I found a switch at radio shack that does just that. It was a special order swtich and therefore cost a little more because of the shipping, but it's worth it. The swtich is green in one direction, red in the other and yellow when it's off. I didn't want the switch to be lighted when it was off so I designed the circuit to only power the swtich when it was in one of the on positons. The blue line that loops back to the switch shows this.

With the circuit designed I had to find a place to mount the switch. Since I also have off road lights I decided I wanted to have the switched near each other. I then realized that since I don't smoke (nor allow smoking in the X), the ash tray is useless space. So I tried to figure out how to make that into a space for the switches. I devised a bracket from a plate I found at Home Depot. With some minor bending I made it to fit in the slot of the ashtray. Here's what I came up with, with the final switches installed.



Then came the actual wiring. I had done this for the KC daylighters so it wasn't that big of a deal, though it did take a while to run the wires. I put the relay under the hood near the battery. From there I needed two wires to run through the firewall. One for the power to the rear and one going to the switch.In the rear I needed two wires as well, one was the power and the other is the signal from the reverse lights. I wanted to find the reverse power in the dash but was unable to reliably. So I settle with just runing the wire all the way to the back. The loss due to the resistance of the wire would be negligible anyway.

With all the wires at the swtiches I had to be careful not to connect the wrong wires. But I finally got it completed and here's what it looked like.




It looks messy but it works. The hook up at the rear for the reverse lights was simply splicing the wire to the existing reverse light wire. Note the blue wire connected to the green wire with red stripe.

With everyting hooked up, here is the final look of the switches up front.



And here are the lights on the back lit up along with the interior lights I installed.