Motorsports One

The catalyst to the transformation of my '15 XLT Sport FX4 was a picture I saw last winter of joshuakline's truck in the Blue Flame thread. His truck had a GalaxyMoto grille with perimeter and FORD letters painted to match. Since I wasn't a big fan of the letters and wanted to give my mod a factory vibe, I chose a Super Duty emblem, the largest blue oval available at 13 inches wide.



Note that I had worked on a PhotoShopped picture of joshuakline's truck to see what my concept would look like, at least 4 or 6 weeks before Ford revealed pictures of the '18 refresh of the F-150. The promo shot of the blue Special Edition truck was almost an exact copy of my concept, here it is compared to my truck.



My truck has come very far from the way it sat in the dealer's lot just before I signed the papers.



I'll detail the grille mod, as well as the other parts that went into this build.

5.Bro

I had the same idea last year. I'm a big fan of the honeycomb grills that came in the 97-04 trucks. So I was waiting for the paramount grill to come out with the grill without letters and adding the factory ford emblem in the middle. They do have one now but I'm still debating it or going for the xlt sport grill.

Motorsports One

The grille mod is one of a few elements that make my truck turn heads with other F-150 owners. One guy told me he thought it was a special package he hadn't heard of.

I got the GalaxyMoto grille from "autopartskingdom" on eBay and it came with amber LED lights. Great paint work by Jeff at E-Coating Solutions in Odessa, Ontario (Canada) gave me the same result joshuakline got with his truck. Note the smaller emblem I initially got, which would not have looked as good as the Super Duty emblem.





I had asked Jeff to try and find a way to mount the large emblem, but everything he tried to fabricate was too thin and brittle due to the curve of the grille not being quite as pronounced as I initially thought it was. So my next idea was to find the original mounting surface for the emblem from a Super Duty grille. These grilles are super expensive as a whole unit (close to $1000), but I found out that the upper trim grilles have a "skeleton" of a grille with the background mesh and emblem mount, while the chrome or brushed pieces mount onto that part. I was lucky to find an eBay seller with that part for only $130.

I cut the emblem mount with a Dremel and trimmed to just the mounting surface and the bezel to the emblem.



Following Jeff's recommendation for an adhesive that would be strong enough to hold the emblem on the grille, I used PL construction glue. A lot of it actually, applied to the grille before installing the emblem mount, but also adding more through the back of the grille in lots of places where there were gaps. I made sure to not use PL near the 4 mounting tabs that hold the emblem to the mount, in case I ever need to replace the emblem.







I think the end result is a grille and emblem that very much look like factory parts and make the front end of the truck look more aggressive.

But I wasn't done yet, I decided to add a few more parts to enhance the aggressive look I had achieved.

tareed94

That honeycomb grill is sweet... Hmmmmm...

Motorsports One

To complete the look, I got the lighting parts with either a black background or a smoked lens.

- Special Edition style headlights from eBay
- Recon smoked lens LED taillights from Stage 3 Motorsports
- Smoked lens third brake light from Amazon

To eliminate the amber glow from the front turn signal bulbs when the lights are off, I got chrome coated dual-filament amber bulbs.

I thought LED reverse bulbs in the taillights instead of incandescent bulbs would be brighter, but I find that is not the case. Maybe I need to find a different style of LED bulb. Philips makes a bulb that has just a few LED lights in it, but they say they are located in the perfect spot to match the position of the filament in an incandescent bulb. However, that 921 bulb doesn't have the same base as the factory 3156 bulb. Even though the socket is supposed to take either bulb, I found the 921 bulbs didn't work out so well and returned them for a refund.

The third brake light is nice, but the black housing doesn't reflect the light from the LED lights like the chrome housing would. Deceptive picture on Amazon's listing showed a bigger glow around the 5 lights, but in reality only the actual LED lights shine with some gap in between them.





Other items that went into my build are:

- AVS Aeroskin II hood protector / deflector from Jegs
- Syppo 8-pin towing mirrors
- '08 FX2 Sport wheels, inspired by SVT's Shelby GT500 wheels
- Tonno Pro soft tri-fold bed cover
- DeeZee bed mat
- WeatherTech tailgate protector

I also trimmed my air dam to a nicer height, as I didn't like seeing the lower A-arm mounting points and frame after I removed it entirely.

Toddman38

iTrader: (5)

Truck looks good, just too many emblems, for my taste.... jmo...

Steven Westberry

How do you like the syppo tow mirrors... I went with the all manual oem mirrors and miss having the power mirror functions and lights but hadn't heard anything about the quality of the syppos

Motorsports One

I like the mirrors, especially the price compared to the OEM ones with the same options. There are a few minor cons to them, all of which I can live with.

- Passenger side main glass is not the standard "objects closer than they appear" type, so gives a slightly limited view of that side. But the convex mirror more than makes up for that.

- Slight distortion at edges of convex glass

- Slight whistling noise, which I think OEM mirrors also have

- No auto-dimming on driver side main glass

Steven Westberry

Yeah the whistle is there with the oem tows as well. Thanks for the info I might look into get a set of syppos and maybe buying a oem top mirror replacement glass to fix that issue and give them a try

XLTnoob

Looks good. I'm torn between those headlights and the anzos.