How to Upgrade to Tow Mirrors 1998-2001 Dodge Ram Part 1

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Hi. I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20 plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly. That's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video were going to show you how to put a set of upgraded tow mirrors with a clearance light on this 1998 Dodge Ram. Tools you'll need are 10 millimeter socket with a ratchet and extension, Phillips screwdriver, putty knife and/or door panel clip tool, flat blade screwdriver, needle nose pliers. You'll need some type of stiff wire or even a coat hanger unbent and cut can work and wiring pliers.

Use a 10 millimeter wrench to loosen up the knot on your negative battery cable and disconnect your negative battery cable. Okay, going to take you through removing the door panel pretty quick. There is a 10 millimeter bolt that holds the inside door handle on. Then 3 Phillip screwdrivers, 2 down in the pull cup, and then 1 up at the corner. Then after you get those off there is a series of clips or pins that push into the door. Use a putty knife or door panel clip tool and pull those pins and they're basically all the way around the outside of the door. If you do want to see this footage here in regular speed check out our other videos for the Dodge Ram door panel removal. Okay, then once you pull the door panel off there's a couple more pins up top. Pull the door panel off, disconnect your power window connection as well as your mirror connection and then remove the pins. If the pins don't come out of the door like on this vehicle remove them with your took and needle nose pliers and put them back on the door panel so you're ready to reinstall.

Pull out the foam insulation from the mirror and now disconnect your mirror. Then there are three 10 millimeter nuts that hold the mirror. Fast forward through removing those three nuts with my 10 millimeter socket and with a ratchet and an extension. Pull the mirror off. Push your harness plug through. Mirror comes off. There are 4 Phillips screws that hold the speaker and you want to remove those screws. Pull your speaker down and then down here disconnect the lead of your speaker, pry the pin away that holds the wiring harness on, and remove. Underneath we're going to remove 3 Phillips screws and pull this bottom panel out. Okay. Our upgraded mirror with a signal comes with a 2 wire harness. The red you want to hook into whatever light you want and the black needs to go to a ground. Okay. Now you have a choice, you can hook the light up to your turn signal or you can hook the light up just to your parking lights and obviously if you hook it to your turn signal the light will flash when your turn signal flashes. If you hook it up to your parking light it'll be on anytime your lights are on and that's usually the better of the two because you want to have it on at night so people can see how wide your vehicle is.

I'm going to show you both so right now I have my key on. Okay, you can see I have my left blinker on and down underneath you need to find these two wires. There's a brown with a red stripe and a green with a red stripe. The green with the red stripe is your left blinker. I know that because I can look at where they're going into the terminal up here. Using an electrical probe you can see I'm probing the green with red and my indicator is flashing with the blinker. Change it to my right hand turn signal probe this brown with red and you can see my indicator starts flashing. Your parking lights it's going to be this black with yellow. Turn off my blinker and turn off my key and just turn on my parking lights. I apologize for the ringing. Probe this black with yellow you can see it's on. Turn off my parking lights and probe the black with yellow again and it's off. Again, the brown with red stripe and green with red stripe are right here. The black with yellow should be right there. Up underneath here's the emergency brake pedal. You want to remove the emergency brake pedal bracket bolt there about back on the firewall and another one back on the firewall and then just move that out of your way to the side a little bit. Bolt over here you're going to want to disconnect this rod from your brake release lever. Just pull that clip down, pull it right out. Now you can access, a little hard to see, but you can access the two right there.

Now we're going to remove the protector tube that runs between the door and the body of the truck. One the door side you just push it back through and into the door and then once you've pushed it through then you can turn it and bring it out. Then on the body side, the body side actually clips and it's a little- my camera's angle is off here. Then you can see. You basically just squeeze the body side and you'll feel there's basically a clip at each corner. You squeeze it and pull it out and then you'll release the tube from the truck. You're going to pull this out and you got a couple of connectors here. Press the buttons and disconnect them. Get a piece of stiff wire, a coat hanger untwisted and unbent and uncut will work. Feed that carefully into this tube and through and make a little hook and bend it over on itself so there's a hole. Okay. Take my wire, the non terminal end, and I fed this through terminal side into the door. Take this wire put it through my little loop I made in my wire and now pull everything right back through. Take my terminal end of the wire make sure it's fed into the door and up right through here. Right now we'll leave ourselves plenty of slack. Take our wire here again feed it in here pull it through this and back through the door.

Now you want to re-bolt your emergency brake or parking brake lever back onto the firewall. Be careful not to pinch the red and black wire. Make sure they are nice and free coming through there. Then obviously you'll need to repeat this whole step for the passenger side door. That is made one step easier because you don't have to, you can easily reach the tube. You don't have to remove the parking brake or any kind of trim or anything like that on the passenger side.

Okay and this is probably about as good or bad as place as any to end part 1 and you want to see us finish wiring it up and install the mirror just check out part 2.

We hope this helps you out. Brought to you by www.1AAuto.com. Your source for quality replacement parts and the best on the internet. Please feel free to call us toll free 888-844-3393. We're the company that's here for you on the internet and in person.