Old F-350 Shines Bright with the Light of 500,000 Lumens!
Truck’s light pods and bars generate enough lumens to light up the darkest night…and make the truck visible from outer space.
A brand new truck is shiny and wonderful, but it can be a velvet prison. The idea of getting a scratch on it is horrifying. That’s what makes old beater pickups so enjoyable. You don’t have to worry about running over a pothole or getting forest pinstripes on it. And if you want to make some alterations to it, they won’t affect the warranty because that probably expired decades ago. Cody Detwiler from the YouTube channel WhistlinDiesel has a battered and beaten old Ford F-350 chassis cab truck, aka Carl, that’s well past its glory days so he went wild on it and gave it a retina-frying amount of auxiliary lighting: 500,000 lumens.
Detwiler and his pals enjoy goofing off out in the country at night. They split into two teams of two people – one team on a red four-wheeler and Detwiler and a friend in Carl – and drive past each other while throwing water balloons and “sometimes a field stone or two…if we get carried away”, according to Detwiler.
But doing that in darkness can be a little tricky. Carl already has some LED pods for headlights, a trio of pods behind his cab, and a couple of auxiliary light bars mounted near the roof. That’s not enough illumination for Detwiler. Luckily, he has six 52-inch light bars laying around, waiting to scorch everyone’s eyeballs. Detwiler says, “I think these are…45,000 lumens a piece.” Carl is a good-times machine so instead of cleverly and strategically integrating all of those bars, Detwiler just mounts them to a pair of wood posts, then installs the entire assembly on Carl’s hood with a little help from a hammer and a few nails.
The end result is just as awful and awesome as you’d expect it to be. Once the front bars are fired up, they’re absolutely blinding. That doesn’t stop Detwiler and his crew from horsing around, though. They head out into the country to conduct their water balloon war. Given that he’s throwing off 500,000 lumens, Carl is an easy target for the liquid ammunition. He’s also incredibly thirsty for battery juice. After one barrage, Detwiler fails to fire Carl up and says, “We have our fifth or sixth dead battery tonight.”
We can’t say we’re shocked, but we can certainly say we’re entertained. Detwiler and his pals put on a helluva (light) show that makes us wish we had a knockaround F-350 and some ridiculous aftermarket parts to add to it just for grins. If you’ll excuse us, we’re going to scour Craigslist for a rusty Ford pickup and gently used stadium lighting…
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