Winter is coming... Let's play with Xmas Lights!

[Mal81]

Ok, this has been done before. But I haven't seen a write up for 79-84 cars, and am flying blind. So, here's a chance for others to learn with me.

I bought a few sets of ten of these T-5 74's in different colors on Ebay. They DO look suspiciously like Christmas lights, but they have an appropriate value resistor soldered in, so my hopes are high.


They are certainly BRIGHT



They fit the old sockets, sorta'... And I had to give it a think.

My solution was 99cent store hot melt glue. I was too cheap to spring another buck for the heat gun, so I used a cigarette lighter instead.

Why hot melt? My reasoning is that it will hold, but not damage anything when I decide to 'undo' this later. IOW, it's a mod that is reversible.

So what I did was put a dab of glue on the shaft of the Christmas light, and then shove it into the socket while it's still hot, like so:




Testing. . . . . . .



It worked!

These lights, like all LEDs that I know of, have a positive and negative polarity.. So you'll need to check this as you go along to prevent putting them in backwards.

[Mal81]

I used the same procedure for holding the sockets in place after testing each circuit on the circuit tape with a 9v battery.



My 'trailer light.' -Is it even possible to TOW anything with our cars???



That was fun.... Might as well do the pod switches next. I'll test them all out in the car tomorrow. Need daylight to connect everything back up.









To be continued....

[The Deputy]

Nice!

Don't drive very often at night, so maybe someday.

Brian.

[Mal81]

Always nice to end the day on a Bright note!