68 brake light snow work! - NCRS Discussion Boards

68 brake light snow work!

Collapse
X
 
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
  • JOHN MELVIN

    68 brake light snow work!

    Heres the advice I followed:

    Posted By: John Hinckley
    Date: Tuesday, 29 October 2002, at 9:09 a.m.

    In Response To: Re: 1968 brake lights dont go on (JOHN MELVIN)

    John -

    Your brake light switch gets (battery) power through a 14-ga. orange wire from the fuse block, and when it closes, it feeds power through the white wire from the switch to the curved turn signal switch connector at the steering column. If the turn signal switch is working and in the straight-ahead position, it feeds power out to the brake lights from the two terminals adjacent to the white wire - yellow (left side) and dark green (right side). If you jumper power directly to the yellow and dark green terminals, that will bypass the turn signal switch and illuminate the brake lights; if that works and jumpering power to the white wire terminal on the curved connector doesn't, the problem is in the turn signal switch.

    Heres what I did as described in the above:
    I jumped a hot wire from the fuse block to the white wire terminal on the crescent shaped wire connector that feeds the steering column. Its easy as there is only one white wire on the connector, and you can test it real quick by just poking the hot wire into the back of the connector until you touch the white wire terminal. Do not disconnect this crescent shaped connector. It must be plugged together to test properly: Viola, brake lights came on, so this showed the turn signal switch was good. If the brake lights didnt come on, that would isolate the prob in the turn signal unit

    I hate to say this on the NCRS forum, but this is how I fixed it: I disconnected the brake light switch connector. Leave the connector off, and just deal with the two wires that go right to the brake light switch. I then took the hot wire and connected it to one side of the brake light switch. On the other side of the switch, I spliced right into that white wire. Works fine now.

    I couldnt trace down where the exact problem lies because to my dash harness is so hacked up from pervious owners with improperly colored wires. I got lucky the steering column wiring hadnt been butchered up.

    My sincere thanks to Mr Hinckley
  • John H.
    Beyond Control Poster
    • December 1, 1997
    • 16513

    #2
    Re: 68 brake light snow work!

    John -

    Glad you got them working again - electrical problems can be frustrating (especially with Bubba'd wiring), but if you look at the wiring diagram and dope out the circuit logic, you can usually find an easy way to trouble-shoot the problem. Lotsa luck to future C5 owners/restorers 30 years from now; there's more wire in one foot of that instrument panel harness than any of us have in our whole car, and 1100 pages of the 4,000-page C5 Shop Manual deal with electrical diagrams and diagnostic trees.

    Comment

    • artarmstrong

      #3
      Re: 68 brake light snow work!

      John, About 5 years ago the Corvette Electrical Engineer asked if I could get find him the Layout for the complete 1953 Corvette electrical system for a comparison presentation that he was going to give to upper management. I got it for him, it consisted of one drawing which was about 3 ft X 5 ft--TOTAL. He also wanted me to get all the Layouts for the current vehicle----as I recall it was the 1997 MY----which consisted of 5 Layouts, that measured about 4.5 ft X 30 ft EACH. The comparison was sticking when seen wrapped around the entire room and was paramount in getting his project approved.

      Art

      Comment

      Working...
      Searching...Please wait.
      An unexpected error was returned: 'Your submission could not be processed because you have logged in since the previous page was loaded.

      Please push the back button and reload the previous window.'
      An unexpected error was returned: 'Your submission could not be processed because the token has expired.

      Please push the back button and reload the previous window.'
      An internal error has occurred and the module cannot be displayed.
      There are no results that meet this criteria.
      Search Result for "|||"