The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The Electrical Bay Instrument Panel Lights

I'm in the process of wiring my instrument lights directly to the taillight terminal on the headlight switch.

How many bulbs are there on the fuel/amp/oil/temp gauge? I expected 4 or at least three like the speedo but it seems like there are only 2. Is this right?

I don't want to keep poking around under there and risk yanking wires out of place if I've located all the bulbs - 2 in this case.

Speaking of bulbs, Rock Auto lists instrument panel bulbs as Phillips #51 and Phillips #55 for the ignition switch bulb.

PO has used GE 55 bulbs in all sockets.

The 55 is listed as 2.87 watts and .41 amps.
The 51 is listed as 1.65 watts and .22 amps

Stock 6v system.

Will leaving the 55s in place overload the system? Do I need to order some 51s? Seems like the 55s will be brighter than the 51s but at what cost?

I think the bigger bulb on the ignition is there being only a small space to get light thru the crack .
I put the bigger bulbs in the clusters to help with how people say that they need more light in the stock configuration, but I can dim it thru the switch if too bright. I don't know what the max current the switch can handle being you are putting all the cluster and tail thru the switch. I have a new 12V switch that is wired to put front and rear tail higher current bulbs on, so I imagine that it can handle just the rear and cluster.
Stock is 2 on speedo, 2 on gauges, and one for the headlight dimmer....but that doesn't run thru the switch.

Otto, like Chip said, only two bulbs in the gauge cluster, and only 2 illumination bulbs in the speedo, plus the one for high beam indicator, which is on a different circuit. So the 4 illumination bulbs for the cluster and speedo, plus the one bulb for the ignition switch are all that should be on the harness that you're going to connect into the taillight terminal. I doubt that the difference in wattage between the 55's and the 51's will overload the switch capacity.
Even with the 51's, the white paint inside the gauge cluster got toasted a bit over the 70 or so years they were in there. The 55's might darken the paint a bit more than the 51's if that's a concern.