Tips for Installing Work Lights

Unless you're buying a big forage harvester like this, more than likely you find the lighting package on your equipment to be a little inadequate. Lighting is one of those places that the manufacturers usually have upgrade kits to put onto your machine to add additional lighting. But many of you, including me as well, probably like to make a little weekend project out of rolling your own lighting upgrades on your tractor. We're going to take a little bit of time today. We're going to talk about some of the things that you might want to consider in picking a work light for your machine and also a couple of tips on how to wire that light into your tractor or equipment.

LED Lights

The popularity of LED lights has become a fantastic thing for adding work lights onto your tractor. If you go back years ago, this was actually surprisingly difficult. A lot of times, in order to hold costs down, manufacturers would only put a simple Dyno onto their tractor and not an actual alternator, and they didn't have a whole lot of accessory amperage available in order to drive lights. We used to see customers putting four and five lights up on their roll bars and pointing them all in different directions to light up the space around their equipment, but then ultimately not having enough amperage production off of the tractor in order to drive all those lights and pulling down the engine's electrical system and causing all kinds of problems. With LED lights though today, that's not so much of an issue anymore. Those halogen lights pull a lot more current off the tractor than the modern LEDs do.

For the most part, if you're sticking with LED lights, you're not going to have an issue finding ones that are going to suit the electrical capacities of your tractor. But if you're saving some money and you're going back and looking at halogens, you want to be a little bit more careful about sizing the amperage demands of those lights to your machine. Upgrading your lighting is a common enough practice that there are some ready-made kits out there depending on the machine that you might have that make this easier. We actually stock these LED headlights for Kubota skid steers from a company called Tiger Lights here. You can find these on our website. We'd also have these ones for John Deere and New Holland skid steers or these drop-ins. Now, there are cases where the manufacturer might offer LED upgrades, but these are going to be drop one options for your machine that are probably going to be a little bit less expensive.

I personally used LED lights from Artillian on my machine. They're not the cheapest thing, but they do offer two things. They've got a really slick bracket that allows you to rotate that light around and they also come in the box with some very good quality wiring. All the wiring is very nice. It comes with the lube tubing and all the electrical connectors are super high quality, which was nice to me. Better electrical connectors than I've ever spent the money for before so check that one out as well. We sell enough of those that we're stocking those here. You can pick them up with your parts orders.

Connecting Lights

You've got your lights. You've got the idea of where you're going to put them. Where are you going to hook this stuff up? If you go around the backside of your tractor, the manufacturer, in most machines, is going to leave some extra pigtails at the back of the machine in order to plug in their accessory light kits. Now, you can use their light kits if you want to and they're going to have some nice directions on how to put all this stuff together, but if you're like me and you like to roll your own on this kind of thing, a multimeter is really helpful.

We're going to take this L series tractor here, flip this over to DC volts on our multimeter, and turn the key into the run position on the tractor. These are usually going to be switched outlets here at the back so when your tractor's turned off, you're not running your work lights and running your battery dead. They're going to be switched. When we're looking for the power here, we want to make sure that we've got the tractor in the run position. Now, if you look up here under the fender, you're going to find usually one or two different things. In this case, is going to be a wiring harness. Now, this harness has both the positive and the negative in it. If we go and separate this harness here a little bit and slide our probes in the back, we'll find right there is our 12 volts, a perfect place in order to tie in our wiring harness for our lights. But not everything looks this way. Let's go check out a different model.

That's the wiring harness. Another version that you'll find in the back of a tractor is called a bullet connector. Now on this LX series Kubota here, they're making this really easy. They've got a positive and negative bullet connector right here in the main wiring harness on the back and even have a little sticker on it, telling you that it's 12 volts, 10 amps. Really handy here in order to have both of those options Kubota's made it easy on the LX series.

The biggest confusion that we'll get when people are looking for these connection points is the tractors that are only going to have one bullet connector dangling at the back of the machine. When you find that that bullet connector is usually your positive, and they're expecting that you're going to find the ground somewhere on the chassis itself, you're going to use a chassis ground for your negative side, finding a good chassis ground on a tractor sometimes can be more difficult than what you would expect. There are so many painted surfaces on these machines and those painted surfaces don't conduct electricity well, right? The last thing you want to do is go through and pick, say a bolt or something that's up on fender to ground against because if that bolt is really only touching painted surfaces at its ends, it's not going to give you a good ground and you could end up with unpredictable operation from your light.

I usually like to go through and look for grounding points that are somewhere connected to the chassis of the machine itself, back in around that transmission housing. Spots around the seat are a really good option where those seat bolts run down into the transmission itself. Those are going to get you a really good ground. This is another place where having your multimeter can be really handy. Take that probe and put the positive side on the one bullet connector that you have there underneath the fender and then take your negative probe and go around and try to find one of those bolts that gives you a good solid ground.

Cab Tractors

Cab tractors have some unique challenges if you're doing your own work lights. Things like the tractor's headliner and roof could bury a lot of those wiring harnesses. Sometimes you're going to go through and pop out some pieces on the inside here to drop the headliner. But we also find sometimes you make better progress by removing the roof from the machine to get easy access to those harnesses and all the pass-through points for the wires. Tractors like this L4060 limited edition have become really popular because most of the times what we're finding is that the manufacturer is getting a much bigger discount on the purchase price than the cost of going back in and adding these lights or mirrors back onto the machine again. We predominantly are selling these more stripped down value models than optioning them back up for your application rather than starting with the deluxe tractors themselves. If you're trying to fill these spots for these work lights up here on the top, working from the bottom under the headliner is one option, but consider popping the roof off there as well and look at things from above.

Attaching Your Lights

There are no shortage of places around your tractor in order to attach lights to, but you're going to find most lights attached onto the roll bar. Now I'm going to tell you that when you attach lights onto the roll bar, you want to be careful about the way that you do it in. Using a U-bolt to go around the roll bar or a bracket, we sell ones from a company called Billy Worx that comes on and off the roll bar really easily, are going to be the preferred way of doing it. You do not want to break out your cordless drill and start drilling holes into your roll bar in order to mount lights to. These are going to be OSHA certified safety devices.

If you go through with a drill and you start punching holes in these things, you would validate the structural integrity of this roll bar and its certification. If you trade that tractor into a dealership, we may look at that machine and decide that roll bar needs to be replaced in order for us to be able to sell that machine with no further liability. The $30 that you might spend out there trying to find some additional hardware to mount your lights up on a roll bar can prevent you from having to replace a several hundred dollars roll bar years down road because of that liability concern.

That's a little bit on adding work lights to your tractor. I love projects like this, right? A little couple hour thing to do on the weekend where I can wrench and work on my machine in the garage for a little bit, doing a fun project like this. Work lights are a really good thing, a good entry level thing. It's not too difficult. Just spend a little bit of time running around the multimeter. Check those couple places here at the back of the machine to figure out where to plug things in and select the right items for the lighting and mounting on your tractor.