Aries TrailChaser Front Bumper w/ LED Lights - Aluminum - Angular Bull Bar - Black

Video Transcript for A Closer Look at the Aries TrailChaser Front Bumper with LED Lights on a 2021 Jeep Wrangler Unlimite

Hi, this is Scott with etrailer and today we're taking a look at and installing our TrailChaser bumper for our 2021 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. If you're looking for a modular lightweight bumper system for your Jeep, the TrailChaser's gonna be a good setup for you. It's made of aluminum, it has a really nice powder coat finish on it, so it's gonna keep the front end of your vehicle light and still be pretty strong. It's gonna give you the ability to mount a winch with the optional winch plate support system we have mounted in on this one. This particular system is gonna have LED light corners on it and these are gonna act basically as ditch lights. They're gonna light up so you can see down the sides of the trail or down in the ditches.

And it has really nice bright LED lights that mount on the side there. It does come with all the wiring and the switch setup so you can have those all wired in when you're putting on your bumper. All right, and we do click our switch on. We do have the little red light that shows that our lights are on, so when they're on inside there, say it's nighttime, you won't jump out and forget that your lights are on 'cause you're gonna see that little red light. This setup does come with the squared off style brush guard here, and what this does is it has the ability to put lights on the top here.

You can pull off this top plate and underneath of this it has slotted holes underneath, so you can either put on singular lights that go across however you want 'em, or you can set it up where you have the square LED light bar up here on the top. So that's a really nice feature. You can set it up where you have your fog lights, factory fog lights, mounted up in here in the front. As long as you have the halogen style, this is just click right in there. And then you can also use your factory wiring for your fog lights as well.

As far as installation goes, it's really not too bad. Basically, you take off your factory bumper and just get this one bolted together and get it put on. If it's something you really don't wanna tackle, you can always take a look at our dealer locator and have it done locally. Or if it's something you wanna do yourself, stick around, watch our video, and we'll help you get it installed. To start our Aries bumper installation, we're gonna need to start with getting this top panel right here unclipped from our frame.

So we have our little plastic push pins here. And as you'll see it has a slot where you can get a screwdriver in there. So what I'm gonna do is just get it turned so I can get access to it, and it will spin for you. Get a screwdriver under it and just work our pin out. And just pull that out on both sides in the front. Along the backside of our bumper here, we're gonna have six push pins. We're gonna go ahead and pop those out the same way we did the ones right here on the frame. With all of our push clips out of the way, we can lift out our panel. On the passenger side you're gonna have a gray plug and that's gonna be for our wiring harness for our front bumper, we're just gonna push in on the clip. Sometimes with these they slide into a little holder here on the side of the frame. You may need to pull this up and just so you can get a better grab on it, but if you push in on this side of the plug and then push in your clip, it's gonna come out a lot easier for you. Sometimes it'll give you a struggle if it's the first time it's ever been unplugged. Underneath our little underbody panel here, we have two 8-millimeter screws. We're just gonna pop those out real quick. (drill whirring) (drill whirring) Along the inside of this panel we're gonna have six push clips. We're just gonna go along with a screwdriver and pop those out and pull them off. Then we can get our panel taken off and put off to the side. With the six clips across the front, what we found easiest is to just get a plastic clip tool and get it from the side and kind of wiggle it in and just push 'em down all the way. These are kind of tucked in there, so they can be a little bit tricky. Now with them all popped out, we can remove our panel. Right here in the front we have this little plate we're gonna get out of the way just to kind of make it easier for us to get up in there and get at our bumper bolts. (drill whirring) (drill whirring) There's gonna be eight 18-millimeter nuts on the back of your bumper, two on each side of the frame here on both sides. So we'll just take an 18-millimeter socket, a deep well socket and we'll go ahead and get those started getting broke loose. (wrench banging) (wrench creaking) (wrench banging) Now before we go any further, we do wanna go over the option of the winch plate, and what this is for is this is gonna allow you to mount a winch on your vehicle. This is something, if you are planning on putting a winch on later on down the line or you do have one you wanna put on, this is something you're gonna want to get put on before you install your bumper. 'Cause this will go underneath your bumper and be a reinforcement plate for your winch. If you're not interested in putting on the winch plate or you don't plan on ever getting a winch on your vehicle, you can go ahead and skip over and we'll get started on putting that bumper on. Now we'll go ahead and get our hardware installed. We're gonna be going through this hole here and this one here. So we're going to utilize our access hole in the front and we're gonna take our spacer and our carriage bolt and just run 'em through. Just kinda let those hang in place. Now this back one can be a little tricky, so you may need to use two fingers. Just go ahead and go through this access hole and then there's another access hole in the bottom, but that's the best way to go with that. Now we have those through, we can go ahead and get our winch plate lined up and get hardware on this side and then we'll move on to the other side. Now we'll just lift our plate into place, and we'll get two of the bolts started there, and then we can get our other side moved and kind of get the holes lined up. And with that held in place we'll get the rest of our hardware put on these. We'll take a flat washer with a lock washer, and thread on a nut. (nut clanging) Normally at this point what you'd want to do is that we have all our hardware in is you'd want to get it leveled out and then get it torqued down. But what I'm gonna do is wait until I get the bumper put in place and get the hardware started on with that and then I'll come back through and get our plate torqued back down to the specifications listed in our instruction manual. At this point in our install, normally we would be taking the fog lights out of our factory bumper and installing them into this. Unfortunately for this one we have the LED fog lights in our factory bumper, so we're not gonna be able to install those. Now if you do have the factory halogen lights, those will pop right into place in this. So for now, we're gonna wait on those and look at our aftermarket options for our fog lights. For now, we're gonna go ahead and start getting our bumper put in place. This can be a tight fit between the frame right here. So just kind of give a little tap, maybe move your bumper around a little bit and you'll get it to go for you. Each side, just kind of tap it in. (bumper clanging) (bumper clanging) When you look right up here in the front, just get your holes lined up the best you can, and we're gonna go ahead and get some hardware started through. You may have to move your bumper around a little bit to get 'em to line up. With all of our hardware in place, we'll go ahead and take our 18-millimeter socket and tighten down our hardware. We just wanna get it snug. (socket creaking) Now that we have all our hardware kinda snug down, we're gonna come back through and we're gonna torque our bolts down to the torque specifications listed in our instruction manual. Now that we have our main body of our bumper all torqued down, now if you went ahead and did the winch plate underneath, now's the time we're gonna want to get it all leveled up with our bumper and line up our holes and get our winch plate torqued down. With our bolts snug down, we're gonna pop back up here and make sure we have everything lined up before we go and do our final torque specs. Everything looks good here, and it looks like it's sitting flat against the bottom of our bumper and the holes look good. So we're gonna hop under there now and we'll torque 'em down to the specifications listed in our instruction manual. Now that we have the center section bumper put on, now is when we can decide on what we wanna put on for our options. The nice thing about this bumper system is it is modular so you can change it up any way you want. Today we are going to be installing this section here for our our brush bar here and we do have the option of our round brush bar here, and with our round brush bar, it does have light tabs already tacked in place here, so you can actually just put on some bolt-on lights if you wanted to and kind of give you an idea of what that looks like on there. We'll just get it set in place. And it is gonna have a little bit of an overhang out the front of the bumper. And what that's gonna do is kind of act like a brush bar. So say you're going through some tall brush or something, this is gonna help push the brush down and under so it's not coming back and smacking up on the front of your Jeep there. And with your light tabs there, that's a nice option too. You can go with your LED squares or rounds, whatever you wanna go with there. And those do mount on with two bolts through our bumper here. So it's kind of a nice design that you have that modular option. Now to mount up our brush bar here, we have all of our hardware lined out and we have our, we have a 16-millimeter socket and we have our ratchet ready to go and we have our 16-millimeter stubby wrench. I'm just gonna go ahead and get it put in place and we'll get our hardware all set up. Now with our hardware just we're gonna start with our bolt and a flat washer and we're gonna run it right through and get it lined up in our bumper. And with that we can go right through the bottom. Use a flat washer and then our lock washer and then our nut. And we'll do this on both sides for all of our hardware. Now with all of our hardware in place, we'll just get it snug down and we'll come back through and torque 'em down. (socket clicking) Before you get 'em completely tight, though, you're gonna wanna make sure you have your bar where you want it, kind of just center it up and make sure it's going through the angles here and make sure you have it right where you want it before you get it down too tight. After we get all of our hardware snug down, we're just gonna come back through with our torque wrench and get it torqued down to the specifications listed in our instruction manual. Now our kit came with our LED end caps here and it does have our LEDs, our wiring kit, and all of the hardware we need. So what we're gonna do before we get these put on is we're gonna get our LED lights put in place. And at the bottom it does have a little notch, and that's gonna match up with the notch in our LED here. So what we'll do is just run our wire through and get our light put in place. And just line our holes up and we'll get our hardware put in. Now we'll take a number 5 Allen wrench and we'll take a 10-millimeter socket and we'll just kinda snug these down. You don't have to go crazy tight with them, you just wanna get 'em snug. Don't wanna break your housing. They can be a little tricky to get at, so you'll have to figure out the best way to do it. But the way I did it is just take a long extension with a deep well socket and just basically I'm turning the Allen wrench in the front. That way I'm not putting too much torque on it to end up snapping my housing. Now that we have our light assemblies installed, we're gonna go ahead and get our end caps put in place. So all we're gonna do is we're gonna line up our holes here and get everything kind of put in place where we want it. Now we'll take our bolt with a flat washer and then we'll put it through the hole. Then we'll take a flat washer, our lock washer, then we'll follow that up with our nut. (nut clanging) And for now, we're just gonna go ahead and get 'em down finger tight until we get 'em all in place and lined up. Then we'll come back through and we'll snug up all of our hardware. With this bottom one here the easiest way to do this one to make it fit is to run the bolt through without the washer. Run it through, install your washer. Run it through the hole, push the bolt through. Go with your washer. Your lock washer and your nut. And that's the easiest way to do it because with the washer on there, it doesn't quite wanna clear this hole. So you wanna have your washer inside of the bumper when you're pushing that through. (nut clanging) Once you get all your hardware snug down and you get all your end caps lined up where you want 'em, you can go ahead and torque 'em down to the manufacturer specifications in our instruction manual. Now with our battery being on the passenger side, we ran our wires down through here, we ran 'em up and over and under our air box intake port right here and then down. Ran 'em up under and got our wires hooked up to our lights and then ended up zip tying off to one of our supports underneath there. So now we have all of our connections up here at our battery where we need them, but unfortunately with this one, our wire for our switch is not gonna be long enough to get in to where we need it to go over there. So I will end up having to make extensions for these lines here and then run 'em through the firewall over there. But for now what we'll do is we'll get our relay, we're just gonna zip tie our relay down over here and get it into a nice spot where it's not gonna be moving around. We will have that up and down, mounted right here against this. And then we can hook up our positive, which is our red over here to one of our blank ends of our terminal here is where we're gonna end up going with that one. Now we've got our positive terminal hooked up to our positive here. We're just gonna get that tightened down. Just wanna be careful when you're messing with this stuff, you don't wanna ground out on anything, so be careful where your ratchet's going. And we've got that hooked up there. Now for my negative terminal, I went ahead and hooked it up here on my negative side of the battery and that'll get us for our electrical connections for that. Now with those hooked up, we're just gonna give them a test real quick with our switch. And they both work. With everything installed and our lights are working, that'll do it for our installation and our look at our Aries TrailChaser bumper system for our 2021 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited.