Rear lamp enhancement
Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2008 19:50
After replacing my rear lamps last month with second hand units I noticed the redundant tail light bulb in the cluster which was used on the Rover SD1 but not on the Excel. Apparently the Rover had separate tail and brake lights whereas the Excel has a combined tail and brake lamp bulb. This means a section of the Excel rear lamp cluster is never illuminated.
I thought about simply wiring the extra bulb into the tail lamp circuit so that each cluster had two tail lights but then decided to instead illuminate the unused section of the tail light with a l.e.d. I chose the l.e.d. because it would consume next to no extra power and place no appreciable extra load on the circuit. It would also look subtly different to the adjacent tail light bulb.
I used two 5mm 12V CJ63 Super-Bright l.e.d.s from Maplins @ 98p for the pair and mounted them by drilling a 5mm hole in the plug which Lotus used to fill the hole for the Rover tail lamp.
The finished job looks good and means if the tail light bulb fails at least there will be some illumination in the cluster.
I thought about simply wiring the extra bulb into the tail lamp circuit so that each cluster had two tail lights but then decided to instead illuminate the unused section of the tail light with a l.e.d. I chose the l.e.d. because it would consume next to no extra power and place no appreciable extra load on the circuit. It would also look subtly different to the adjacent tail light bulb.
I used two 5mm 12V CJ63 Super-Bright l.e.d.s from Maplins @ 98p for the pair and mounted them by drilling a 5mm hole in the plug which Lotus used to fill the hole for the Rover tail lamp.
The finished job looks good and means if the tail light bulb fails at least there will be some illumination in the cluster.
