Ford F-150 Lightning Nitrous Install - Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

It's common knowledge that adding a nitrous oxide kit to your Lightning, when done the right way, will add a measured amount of horsepower with just the flick of a wide-open throttle switch. The question remains just how much the sauce can help a truck with as many bolt-ons as our resident project truck, the Fridge, already has. Is the juice really worth the squeeze? We set to find out by installing a Nitrous Express Ford EFI nitrous kit and accompanying GenX-2 accessory kit on the in-house SVT special. Follow along as we show you how it's done.

We decided it was time for the Fridge to get all sauced up, so we cruised down to JDM Engineering with our Nitrous Express nitrous kit in hand.	Before we started drilling and cutting, we looked around the truck to find the best possible spot to mount the bottle. Nitrous Express shipped its Ford EFI kit with a 15-pound bottle, so we needed a decent size area to fit it. Putting it in the cab is not recommended, so the back left area of the bed was the spot of choice for the bottle.	Take a look at the dash of the Fridge. By the time we finished installing the kit, the necessary switches for the kit would be cleanly mounted. The goal with this installation was to keep the truck as clean and as factory looking as possible. Our inspiration and reference for this project came from Don Justus' championship-winning FFW Tough Truck category Lightning, which was in the JDM shop getting prepared for the upcoming '07 FFW season.
Once we picked a location for the bottle, we mocked it up to get a general idea of where we needed to drill holes, run lines, and install items. We got under the truck and double-checked our point of installation, making sure it would be easy to access the bottle-bracket bolts from underneath.	We also eyed up how we'd run the nitrous feed lines and bottle-heater wires from the bed to the front of the truck. Once we had everything mocked up, it was time to get cracking. The first thing we did was take out the nitrous bottle and wrap it with the bottle brackets so we could mark off where the bottle would go in the bed.	With the bottle shroud in the bottle brackets, Shaun Lacko of JDM carefully situated the bottle in the bed, moving it around until he found the mounting point he liked best. Once he had the bottle in the correct spot, he used a Sharpie to mark where to drill holes for the bottle brackets, and then proceeded to drill in the bed.
Remove the tailgate to make accessing the bed easier, and drill a small pilot hole first before final drilling the hole to the correct size. In addition to drilling the holes for brackets, Shaun also drilled holes for the nitrous line and bottle heater wires to go through.	Once the holes are drilled, remove the brackets from the bottle and tighten them down to the bed. When installing the brackets, make sure the shorter one is toward the rear of the truck. A siphon tube is inside the nitrous bottle. This tube picks up the nitrous, and if you have the bottle mounted upside down or with the siphon tube toward the top, you will not use all of the nitrous in the bottle. Installing the brackets is a two-person job, as you need someone to keep a wrench on the bolt while you go under the truck and tighten the nylon locking nut.	Once the bottle brackets were installed, it was time to assemble the bottle fittings and install the bottle. We placed the bottle on a bench and carefully installed the nitrous-pressure gauge, pressure-relief valve, and heater solenoid.