bigbassman,
You are frustrated with your lighting and Cletis is frustrated that you don't appear to understand the importance of grounding.
Every thing you said was wrong can be traced to bad grounds. When you got sparks when the license plate bracket hit the bed, it was because the lights didn't have a ground path until the bracket hit the bed, not because the bed was hot wired. When you hooked a ground to the socket and the light got too bright, it was because the other light sockets that you hadn't grounded were getting their ground through the filaments of their lamps to the brake light filament on the light you had grounded. If you had grounded all the sockets, that wouldn't have happened.
