Pete Trasborg
Brand Manager, Jp
Yeah, so apparently you guys like to slap all this heavy steel crap on your Jeeps. I’m kind of confused as to why. I mean, just drive around the rocks or trees, and you won’t need to add all the extra weight. Jeeps aren’t supposed to be battering rams. What are you guys really building these things for? I see a bunch of Jeep-based bank robberies or something coming up. It seems to me you can go off-road, not smash your Jeeps all the time, and not add 500 pounds of crap to the butt of them them if you just drive better.
But what do I know? I spend all my time in a ’73 El Camino with Earl, but it sure seems to me that you shouldn’t need all that added weight on the Jeep. Trasborg agrees and refuses to put armor on Jp’s JK. However, he has had issues with the factory taillights falling out. Don’t ask how; I don’t really know. One of the problems with the ’07-present Jeep is that there really isn’t a great way to swap taillights to something more beefy without adding tons of armor. But Off Road Only (ORO) came up with a way, and I told Trasborg. So, he decided to have me install ORO’s ABS-molded Lite Panels that work with their LiteDOTs on Jp’s ’07 JK.
As usual, ORO included everything needed for a seamless install. You just have to be OK with playing with fire. Sure, you could do it with a heat gun, but where’s the fun in that?
The kit includes the Lite Panels, LiteDOTs, these light boxes, and connectors to connect the lights to your Jeep. The JK is a funky Jeep. I think going back to those pigs again would be better than trying to figure out something to trick a JK. ORO took the easy way out. With these aluminum boxes, you just move your factory turn signal over to them, and zip-tie it up inside the wheelwells. Having the factory lights still in there makes the Jeep think that the factory lights are still on it, even though it will now have the newly upgraded LEDs.
The instructions make it easy for even me to hook stuff up. They call out the wire colors on both the LiteDOTs and the factory harness. Then, the new lights and Lite Panels bolt into the factory spot better than the factory lights did. It’s really a slam-dunk installation and took me less than 30 minutes to do.
The kit includes these cool heat-shrink solder-loaded connectors that make installation a breeze. All you have to do is strip the wires, put ’em in, and then heat up the connector. It has solder in it so it makes a solder joint between for an awesome water-tight connection. The bolt-on installation is cool, because you don’t have to cut your Jeep up at all.
These are the new LiteDOTs that have a different pattern than the old ones and have additional protection to keep LEDs from going out. On the old ones, if you gorilla grip the bolts when tightening them, you ran the risk of breaking the PCB and losing LEDs. These new ones aren’t supposed to do that, but I still was careful bolting them in. They are super bright, and I don’t think they will ever fall out of the Jeep.
