Ever wanted to replace your 3rd brake light and truck bed courtesy lights? Here's a quick step by step, how to remove the 3rd brake light, remove the original bulbs, replace them with LED, and put everything back into place.
1.) First, let's start by locating your 3rd brake light.
2.) Locate the two philip screws on either side, left and right. You'll need a philip screw driver for these. Remove both of them.
3.) After you removed both of the screws. You'll notice a black circle, its a washer seal. Mine came out on a screw and the other was stuck within the plastic brake light assembly.
4.) Slightly use a flat head screwdriver to pry the brake light housing from the fit cab of the truck. You can use your hands if you think that you might chip the plastic or break it. Either way, it should come out easy.
5.) It should easily come out. If you pull on it and its not coming out, make sure it is not stuck or glued / sealed into the cab opening. Now when you pull it out, it will look sometimes like this.
6.) At the very top right corner, the main wire is passed through a hook. If you pull to hard, you'll either rip the wires internally or you might break the plastic clip type hook. Simply guide the wire out of the hook, it makes things so much easier to deal with.
7.) Next, you can start to unscrew counter clock wise each bulb plug assembly out of the assembly. You might be surprised that as easy as it is, the bulb might fall out into the assembly before you take the wire plug out. You can see in image below, on the left side that's locked and right side is unlocked ready to get pulled.
8.) After you do all three, twist them and pull them out. You'll end up with something like this. Put the assembly aside so we can concentrate on the lighting itself.
9.) Next, if all of your bulbs stayed within you can simply pull on the slightly to pry them out. Like so;
10.) Next, let's put those shiny new LED bulbs in. However, I always like to compare and make sure that someone out of my control didn't screw up and sent me the wrong one. So a quick comparison LED vs OEM.
11.) You can now take your LED and put it into the socket. Slightly, don't push to hard not to break anything.
12.) After you got them all in, replaced with LED bulbs and before we put everything together its time to TEST. Saving you time because if something doesn't work, you'll be taking it all apart again. I've tested my brake light by making my wire hang and jumping into the truck pressing the brake pedal and looking back while I'm doing it. A good friend helping you with this would also work. As you can see in the photo below, all works good. The middle one isn't lit, because I'm not at the wheel pressing the brake but I assure you, if you test it the way I did, mine works just not in the photo.
13.) Let's go in the reverse order and start putting things back together. First, we are going to put each bulb into the assembly and twist clockwise to lock them in.
14.) Everything looks good, so let's put the assembly into the cab, making sure everything is aligned and fits.
15.) Grab your screws, the two of them and guide them into their respective locations. Don't tighten too hard or you'll break the assembly plastic. It will leak if it breaks.
That's it. Now your 3rd brake light on your F150 Ecoboost truck are LED's. Enjoy!