The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The Electrical Bay Second tail light weirdness

Well, today I hooked up (parallel wiring) a right side tail/brake light on my 53 3100. Seemed simple enough! But here's the latest dilemma:

Now when just the headlights and/or parking lights are turned "on," the new right-side tail-light works "pretty" good ie: it's just a tad dimmer than the driver side original.

However, when the brakes are applied while the headlights or parking lights are "on," the new right-sided light goes completely dark, while the left one functions perfectly.

If the headlight switch is in the "off" position, the original driver side BRAKE light works fine, but the new right-side BRAKE light is barely visible, even at night.

1)Could this be a grounding issue?

2)Could it be that I used too big of a wire? (I have two huge rolls of #12 stranded wire laying around here for years and I thought, "I'm not gonna live long enough to use all this, so why go spend more money on new, smaller gauge wire")

.....Hmmmmm .... anyway, your thoughts???? Thanks, guys!

Grounds.

agreed - its certainly not too big of a wire

A week or bad ground can cause some really weird issues due to back-feeding voltage through other components.

Thanks, brothers! I ran a dedicated ground from one of the tail light mounting studs to the frame and everything works well now. Still just a little dimmer, but very, very close to perfect....