I've been eyeing this project for a months (I dm'd OP a long time ago to check my knowledge/part list). Fresh of my track day high and too cheap to dive into the world of suspension/camber mods, I decided to buy all the stuff necessary to make it happen. I'd like to say it took an hour or two like OP but the truth is, I made several mistakes along the way and this ended up being closer to an 6 hour endeavor. However, knowing what I know now, I could likely do it again in the original estimated 1-2 hours.
I followed the original post and added the Voltage Regulator and PPF tricks as outlined in follow up comments. The circuit to have my strip respond to braking seemed a bit more complex and I punted that project to another day.
Another iffy bit was pulling up the trim to get to the wires. Took a bit of work but you can separate the trim in the corner by the 2 arrow tabs allowing you to pull back the side portion of the trim more to get access to the wires.
Not sure if intentional, but the wires are covered in this incredible sticky substance that was just not pleasant to work with my bare hands. I unwound a bit of the cord to free up the cables. I used wire taps to avoid messing up the existing cabling too much but I don't own pliers so I grabbed a crab claw cracker and managed to use that to push the tap in.
Here's everything wired up and into place before putting the trim back in place
Now for the strip install...
My first mistake was really silly: I put the mounting tape on the wrong side of the strip so the wires that lead into the car went towards the right instead of the left. I'm not sure if that is a deal breaker but I figured i'd just tear it off and remount because I was still at the workstation.
I had only purchased 5ft of molding tape so I same-day shipped another 5ft to keep the project going.
The second mistake was a lot rougher: I primed and mounted the led strip on but when I wired everything up I never got the strip the light up. While trying to feed the cable into my car, my partner and I sort of yanked the cable at an angle harder than we'd like due to the strip already being mounted and not having a lot of flexibility. Upon deconstruction, the point where I soldered wire to the led strip had torn off. Luckily, i ordered 3 meters of the LED strip from Aliexpress as a backup. But this wasn't even the worst part of this mistake. The primer + 3m adhesive works. TOO WELL i'd say. Pulling off the existing strip was a PITA and the tape crumbled onto the trim of the car so I was left with scrubbing off the remaining bits for about an hour or so. This wouldn't be so bad if I could've removed the spoiler to open up the work area but I didn't have a tool to reach the outer screws...
At this point you may notice I have run out of molding tape again... or so I thought. After measuring the remainder, I figured I could get away with a gap in the tape and use the remaining .8m to support the 1.1m strip.
The white area are unsupported by molding tape.
The silver lining of this failure was that I realized I had not applied the PPF to the first strip so I made sure to do that this time around 🙂 The blunder here was that I only ordered a roll of 1 meter (reminder: strip is 1.1m 🥹).
I went back and installed the strip, double checking it lit up at almost every step. The result was actually a LOT better than I had imagined and many of my friends were impressed with the look/effect.
As of right now it is pouring rain in SoCal and I forgot to seal off the other end of led strip until just now so I haven't tested if this is waterproof... but certainly hoping it is after that. Only time will tell if the strip and install holds up but for around $100 this was well worth the time (and stress) of the project. Bonus satisfaction for doing something myself.
