Building and Heavily Modifying a 2021 Ford Ranger XLT – Part 1 – Better than the Lariat?

Our 2021 Ford Ranger project is officially kicking off! We’re all stoked on this truck & have a TON of mods lined up! Comment down below if you want more truck content! What mods do you think we should we do next?

What’s up guys welcome back to the throttle channel today we’ve got some ranger content for you guys we know you’ve been wanting this for a while picked up this ranger just about four months ago now it already has almost 9 000 miles on it i’ve been driving the wheels off it and so have the guys here at the shop and we’re really enjoying this ranger one thing we

Found that it is lacking is a nice set of headlights and if you guys have ever driven one of these new rangers the headlights are absolutely terrible unless you get the lariat model which comes with a projector style led headlight we reach out to our friends over at alpharex usa and source these awesome led projector style headlights now these are the creme de

La creme from alpha rex they are the best that they make i really like the modern styling of them looks more like a acura or audi style interior headlight it’s got t3 it’s got two standard low beams it’s got one high beam so three total projectors in here and it also has led sequential turn signals and daytime running lights i’m excited these are gonna update the

Front of our truck a lot over these old-school style halogen lights the cherry on top for today’s video is gonna be our carbon-tastic carbon fiber replacement steering wheel so i was able to spec this out to my specifications as you can see it has a fluorescent yellow 12 o’clock stripe which i love uh adds a little floral pop to the truck which i like to always do

We did dry carbon around the outside perimeter the lower portion of the top portion we did a little bit of alcantara on the sides with a gray stitch i think it looks great it allows us to keep all of the functions of our steering wheel and it will retain the airbag as well so we get the best of both worlds we get an aftermarket wheel but we retain the safety of

The vehicle with the the airbag installed in the steering wheel still no crazy lights and all the safety factors that we like to have in the truck so ain’t nothing to about to do it we’re going to toss these lights in get the steering wheel popped in and we’ll show you guys along the way all right let’s start by removing our negative terminal here there

Are a million screws and clips that have to come out to get this apart and you really have to pretty much disassemble the majority of the exterior of the front end to do this one thing we won’t be removing is the steel bumper which is good but this fascia here has to come off our fascia there’s i think five screws under here i’ve already taken the screws out of

The corners as you saw and the fasteners there so this thing should lift off once i get these other four out and there’s uh two more on each side then this painted piece will come out and that will allow us access to the bottom bolts for the headlights it’s a lot of work for some headlights but uh i think they’re worth it now would have been a really good time

To replace our inner core with an upgraded intercooler and also a radiator and maybe some other bits too that are back here but uh because this is such a chore we should have paired it all together but it’s okay we’ll get there it’s gonna look good and i know we have an intercooler on order and some other bits too so we’ll just now that we know how to do it we’ll

Blow it back apart it’s not that difficult dude all right the new headlights from alpha x are gonna go in now we got the old ones out i was told this is about a four hour job we’re probably about 40 minutes in at this point so it’s really not that bad if you’re considering this don’t be scared as long as you have a decent little set of tools you’ll be all

Right it’s really not that difficult just a little um intimidating i think more than anything oh that looks sick that’s even better than i thought oh what is this a raptor a raptor ranger triple triple lights in there triple projector so these two are the like the regular headlights and this is all right mickey how’s it going yeah we’re uh actually

Putting everything back together now which is cool um like i said previously this job wasn’t as uh daunting as i thought it was gonna be heard a lot of horror stories but it’s just a lot of fasteners so a little time consuming but we’re for an hour and ten in maybe i don’t know something like that and we’re already going back together so um gonna button up

All the factory panels and get it looking like a truck again and then we’re gonna tackle the small little harness that was sent with the lights it’s basically a power ground which you run straight to the battery and then a third wire which is a fuse tap and that’s going to allow us to power up the daytime running lights as well as the i think it also manages

The sequentials i want to use these to their full potential so we’re going to wire that up at the very end and then we’ll move on to the steering wheel and i have one other little kicker that we’re going to throw at the end of the video here all right alphorex kit comes with this little harness as i spoke about earlier and so essentially it’s power ground

Red and black and you got this gray wire that has a basically this has a fuse tap on it so we’re going to slip this into the fuse position number 24 which look on the back of our fuse panel is this guy right here so it’s just to the right of 33 33 is a big relay it looks like a fuse yep and so we’ve got the 10 amp here so i need to find a little fuse puller

I.e you don’t need pliers pull this guy out kaboom put this guy in oh a little sequential action turn on the headlights so that’s the daytime running light okay that should be daytime yeah that’s all okay very nice very modern yep yep amber’s out the bottom all right well i went ahead and ran the wiring underneath the core support and zip tied it

Up underneath here so that it’s sort of out of out of sight it’s going to do a little bit more tidying up over here to get some of these wires just sort of out of sight out of mind the plastic panel is going to go back on here and this all disappears which is cool but i mean really we can run without it there’s no wiring visible at all which is pretty cool so

I’m going to toss this back on button up that and we’ll move on to the stream all right well we’re gonna move on to the steering wheel as you can see this is a pretty base model truck does have some features on the steering which is cool but this steering wheel is plastic and crappy the carbon-tastic wheel is definitely going to be a huge upgrade over this i’m

Just going to pop this airbag off take the center nut out this will come off undo the wiring for that this steering wheel has holes on the side here so we’re just going to insert this into here hopefully there’s a clip that will release this i’m pretty sure that’s how it works but we’re going to figure it out pop this off consuming off get the new one in and we’ll

Show you guys but we got to swap these too some of the features are different except we’ll show that on the table when we get there that wasn’t too bad so there’s some variation in these bottom sets down here so i went ahead and swapped over our harness too just in case there’s a variation it looks like all the wires are the same but i don’t want to get it

All back together and then find out that i needed the some other wiring because some of these functions are a little different so just to make sure everything’s the same we’re gonna take the guts out of our steering wheel and put them in the carbontastic wheel then there’s no guessing that just take a few minutes just gotta take some screws out swap those over

And we’ll be on our merry way all right now this is a pretty simple process we’re just going to put these back blue to blue yellow to yellow and then you got these guide pins right here that won’t steer you wrong so those in click down the lock the guide pins in there we have it wow fitment is nice i really like this huge shout out to carbontastic they

Really uh took my vision and made it reality this is pretty sick flat bottom it’s still very thick and still feels like you’re in a truck but way way nicer than that stock wheel oh man i can’t wait to drive this thing now all right that was pretty simple install but man so rewarding let’s get on to the third brake light i know a lot of you guys are gonna get

Me fit for this bed not having a treatment on it but don’t worry guys we’re doing something about it right now we’re using the truck as is and we’ve scratched up the paint pretty bad which kills me but it’s mostly shawn’s fault and so i blame him but we are going to get a bedliner sprayed in this thing so hopefully sooner than later what can i say i’m the only

One that drives this truck knows how to use the truck a lot of times when you do leds they don’t sync up with the halogens very well but this one’s actually perfect and just a little um a little tip this is actually for a ford f-150 if you guys want to do this to your ranger you’re probably not going to find any listed as a ranger application i couldn’t find

Any so i did a bunch of research and found out this light is actually the same one that they use on the f-150s probably raptor as well i’m not a hundred percent of that but uh this did cross over so i just bought an f-150 smoked cab light leds and it works it fits perfect the harness is exactly the same literally could pop that in 10-15 minutes so nice little

Upgrade continues this theme of the black and gray on the truck and also the led upgrades now we just need to find a set of tail lights if you guys know we can find a set of 19 and up ranger led tail lights please shoot us a link down in the comments and let us know because i am looking for a set i haven’t been able to find any yet i think they probably exist

But having any luck so let us know all right well we just got done buttoning up the truck and i wanted to take it out for a little drive real quick just to see how the steering wheel is can’t really test the lights because it’s still daytime out but we’ll see those tonight on our way home from work and i’ll report back to you guys maybe in the next video about

The ranger how they are which is the little review of uh how useful the upgraded leds from alpha x are but the stream wheel feels amazing i already know i haven’t got over about 10 miles an hour so i just want to make sure that steering alignment’s good all the functions work now that leads me to trucks essentially i kind of want to know what you guys think

About trucks because if you’re a car guy there’s a really good chance you also have a need for a truck because if you’re tracking your car if you’re moving vehicles a lot of times you need a tow vehicle for us here at throttle the reason that we went out and got this ranger was so that we could tow our cars to and from the body shop to the racetrack wherever

And not have to be renting u-hauls all the time which is what we were doing and that’s highly ineffective and it’s very expensive we got this ranger uh it has great towing capacity for a midsize truck the reason we didn’t go with an f-150 is because it doesn’t fit in my garage this truck actually has a 7 500 pound maximum towing capacity in the format that we

Have it the four-wheel drive is key to that and the factory installed hitch package i don’t see us towing anything that heavy uh we don’t want to be doing major duties with this truck but if we do need to run say run the eclipse up to the paint shop or any of the chassis we have the ability to do that this truck serves that purpose it also serves the purpose of

Me getting back and forth to work every day so it’s good for both things but what i really want to know is we get a lot of comments about other is there ranger content coming up is ranger content coming up does that mean you guys want to see more truck content here on throttle if so i’d like to hear about it in the comments section please let us know if you

Want to see more of this content or if you’re strictly watching us because you want to see japanese and european cars get built from the ground up that’s fine too but uh we want to know maybe uh maybe you want to see us get into the diesel truck market we know that’s a huge segment and the fact that we already sell parts online we can easily get into diesel truck

Stuff we easily get into off-road truck stuff even overland stuff you know desert stuff whatever it is we can do it but we want to see if you guys are into it if you’re not into it we probably won’t do it because you guys are a large part of why we do what we do everything seems to be working great with the carbontastic steering wheel so we’re going to head back

To the shop now pull the garage down turn the lights off and actually test the headlights to make sure that they look good everything’s functioning with those yeah we’re in good shape so let’s head back to the show all right well we decided we’d pull the truck into the shop turn the lights off and see the cut off on these alpha x lights it’s pretty impressive

Now i will say this is with no adjustment and we did lift this truck two inches in the front so it’s quite a bit higher than it probably should be so we need to bring them down a little bit and i’m going to do that fine adjustment off camera i don’t want any blinding people on the road so you can see here though the cutoff is really nice you can see the steps

In the cutoff which is really clean when the bright lights come on it takes away the cutoff and all of the light can escape through the projector which is really nice so let’s see that real quick yeah so look at that so that’s going to light up a lot this is about 10 feet from the door so again cutoffs a little bit high we’re going to go ahead and make that

Adjustment we’ll bring them down a little bit but man what an improvement over the stock headlights i’m sorry we don’t have a stock versus alpha x comparo in this video we should have done that before we didn’t film anything uh we’re excited to get these headlights in but i will tell you i drive this truck every day this is a night and day improvement no pun

Intended it is amazing so huge shout out to alpha x huge shout out to carbontastic and huge shout out to whoever sells that third brake light on amazon because it’s amazing so thank you guys so much for tuning in today it’s been a fun one this is a quick half day install for all this stuff so we’ve got a shelf full of parts behind me additionally for this truck

That are going to be going on so stay tuned if you’re into the ranger content you will be seeing more of that periodically sprinkled in with the eclipse the civic the 350 ev project the ranger stuff will be sprinkling with that and we have another amazing project that we’re going to be announcing very soon so you guys are going to have to hit the subscribe button

And stay tuned for that content because it’s coming very shortly leave us a comment down below if there’s some mods you want to see us do to this ranger and hit those thumbs up we appreciate all of it we’ll see you guys in the next one you

Transcribed from video
Building and Heavily Modifying a 2021 Ford Ranger XLT – Part 1 – Better than the Lariat? By throtl