Hey all, was wondering how some of you have made your blinkers on your tail lights double as running lights? Also I wanted my rear side markers and front side markers to work as blinkers as well. I tried to run a jumper from my blinker in back to my side marker, and it made my bunker light up like a market light, but didn't work as a blinker. Only other thing I could think to do ids run a wire from my front blinker to my rear and not worry about the side markers, but then that would make my blinkers be tweaker blinkers. Anybody else have any ideas?

 

The blinker circuit is only made for a certain number of bulbs, add or take away from that number and you effect how the circuit reacts. That is why lets say a car has 4 blinker bulbs, one goes out on the Right Front, the Right Rear will now blink twice as fast. This attempts to tell you that you have a light out.

This isn't saying it can't be done, but its not a simple just wire it into the circuit and be done with it. And so far from your recent posts, I would leave this for another day and handle your other electrical issues first.

 

/\ agreed. When wiring a trailer for a truck, things can be weird. It's trail and error.

 

I wonder what would happen if you used the blinker voltage to trigger a relay and ran a new source volatge to supply the blinkers from the relay?

 

That would still be putting another load on the circuit, but it would knock it down to 1 extra load instead of several.

 

In the past, on another vehicle, I had added trailer wiring and corrected the flash speed issue by replacing the standard flasher relay with an electronic flasher relay.

 

What I was thinking was to only supply the rely with the signal from the main circuit, removing the factory power source from the blinker lights. This would require one rely for the drivers side blinker lights and one for the passenger side blinker lights. Doing it this way would put less of a load.

 

Done. Now back to this. I like the idea of the added relay. Is there anybody we know of that has actually worked and not be Jerry rigged?

 

Make the additional bulbs using LED's. They have insufficient load to be detected (up to a point.) The ones I used in my 85 GSL-EV would have taken about 13 to equal the load of a single 1156 or 1157 filament bulb. The ones I used unfortunately are $25 each but are brighter and should operate for around 30000 hours. As running lights they are only at half brightness which should increase the lifespan by an order of magnitude. Essentially they will never wear out in this application. (You would have to stand on your brakes for 30k hours or operate the blinkers for 60k hours assuming a 50% duty cycle.)

I have a thread somewhere about using LED's.

If you want to make the rear turn signals act as running lights grab a set of taillights off a wrecked FB and use the holders for the brakes. I think the holder would fit the bayonet in the rear turn signal. Wire the driving light element to the brake light driving light wire and wire the turn signal to the original turn signal wire. Replace with 1157 bulb like in the front or the brakes use or use LED bulbs and add the load resistor so the blinkers operate correctly. Just remove the warning indicator in the dash that tells you the brake light bulb is out because it likely never will fail.

I would do the LED's before I would add a relay. The relay is a small additional load on the system to keep coil energized. The contacts are a wear item. But you can do both if you want to and the relay would last a lot longer.

I hope that was helpful.

 

You're going to need to switch to synthetic blinker fluid if you do this.

That or run pre-mixed bulbs.

 

As far as the front markers for blinkers:
The stock bulb in the housing is a 194a I believe (or it's an equivalent, one stage bulb) which is incapable of being a running light and flash a brighter filament to create a blinker-type operation. To make your front, or rear for that matter, marker lights blink you'd have to either run a larger bulb in the stock housing (which is darn near impossible with how it's built) or build a custom LED marker light like I did in my FB. They are much brighter, and will last longer than a regular bulb (as Doug stated above).

Someday I'll end up going back and make use of dual-stage wiring to have my LED marker lights be dual-stage and capable of blinking. I will do this to the front and rear lights, but it's way down on my to-do list. Right next to full custom LED tail lights, I've been wanting those for over a year but don't have the time or energy to get them done (even with 3 spare tail light housings in a box of parts out back)

 

Smart *** ;p I might have some seat rails btw. I'll check tomorrow.

 

It was really helpful actually. I think this is going to be my plan of attack. Thanks.

 

That's now on my to do list. I was already planning on replacing all my exteriors minus headlights and fog lights with led. Might add well try to do some work lol.

 

Haha yeah, the project took a halt when I really started looking into it. Gets in excess of $200 per tail light in my case with how I want them done so I'll be putting it on hold for quite a while here.

Go for the LED swap first to learn, here's the link to my thread on how I did it:
Converting FB Marker Lights to LED Lights

You'd have to modify it to accommodate for dual stage wiring of course, but that's how I did it over a year ago now.