delboy

Was left on my own today at Motor Store and bought some sidemarker lights for 5 euro and a set of rear 'Jaos' imitation mud flap for 35 euro. They look just the same with the aluminium strip and holes etc. They didnt have the wire connector so i made one from a bicycle brake cable, some self tapping screws and a female electrical connector. Look great. Gonna get anothe rset for the front soon. Used the side marker lights to do the footwell lighting mod. I have lights in the front doors, so just hooked them up to the wires going to these. This is a good and very cheap mod!
Happy now!

Cebby

Pics man, Pics!

I also bought the sidemarker lights for the footwell lighting, but they are still "getting used to my garage". Maybe next weekend (hitting the links tomorrow!!)

delboy

Sorry Cebby! Don't have a digicam or a scanner yet so posting pics is a problem. Did the drivers side one today. Took 15 mins. One of the easiest mods ever. I know i cant switch them on normally, just with the doors open but i dont care, they really make a difference at night. Make the surf more welcoming and easier to find dtuff on the floor. Hope urs goes well!

midiwall

I just ordered up a set of these to use as footwell lamps:

http://www.jcwhitney.com/item.jhtml?...=52904&BQ=jcw2
http://www.jcwhitney.com/item.jhtml?...=52956&BQ=jcw2

I figured that with the swivel head, I can tuck them in just about anywhere up in the footwell and get good coverage.

I should have them next week, and hopefully get some good weather to put them in.

delboy

Very Fancy! Must be a very small aircraft though!

Mad Chemist

Hey MPULVER,

Great find- are you going to leave the stock bulbs in there, or put some colored ones in?

midiwall

I dunno actually... I suspect that initally I'll leave the straight white ones in, but blue or a soft red might look pretty cool. One thing I thought was cool about these is that they do take standard sized bulbs so it should be easy to experiment.

I'm contemplating which lights to wire them into... The two domes up in the headliner for independent L/R control, or the main dome so that they go on when the door opens and I can turn them on with the switch as well.

I'll play with the options when I get 'em, and I'll be sure to post pictures of how it all goes together.

Mad Chemist

Mark,

Tough choice- if you wire them into the two domes, they'll come on if you turn them on while driving too- I would think the less light the better. What about the central dome light, if you wired them to that 3-way switch, you could either have them come on when the door opens or manually via the switch. Food for thought, look forward to the pics.

David

midiwall

What I might do is to wire the headliner lights in parallel with the center dome light, and add diodes to prevent reverse current flow. The net effect will be to allow the footwells to come on when the doors open, but still have the ability to flip them on individually.

The downside of course is that if someone wants to use a headliner light to read by, then their floorlamp would come on as well. That wouldn't really affect me as the driver though... and they'd just have to deal.

Hmm... There's definitely some play-time in my future.

mark from uk

they are very nice lights i am going to have to get back to the states to do a bit of serious shopping soon

DuB

If you guys are interested, I wired up my footwell lights with two relays and two switches which allow me to control if they come on with the domelight or not, and also to turn them on (or off) whenever I want.

http://www.cardomain.com/member_page...=193624&page=8

midiwall

That's interesting Jason... (and an interesting site as well!)

I'm curious about your use of relays, they seem like overkill. Did you find that the neon kits were drawing that much current or did you use relays out of familiarity and/or isolation?


The rig looks good man, thanks for sharing!

Mark

DuB

Thanks for the comments

Well, I used the relays for a couple of reasons. I'm not sure how many are valid
-I wasn't sure how many neons I would have in the end, and I didn't know how much power each one drew, so I didn't want to piggyback all that on the domelight.
-I didn't want the unknown amount of power to run through the mini-toggle switches I used to trigger the relay cause those things are tiny.
-using the relays allowed me a little more control.
-I didn't want a bunch of wires running up that high in the dash since it's already pretty cluttered up there.
-I had a bunch of relays lying around so I figured why not

I ended up having (4) 8", (4) 18", and (1) 12" neon.

midiwall

Gotcha'.. Sorry if I came off crass, I think 6am is a bit early for me to be posting.

midiwall

Hi all;

I got my footwell lamps installed today.

Pics and babble are here:

http://www.midiwall.com/4Runner/footwell.html

The passenger side comes out looking REALLY bright in the pic. It is brighter than the driver's side, but most of that is from the long exposure time on the camera.