I noticed that the tail lights in the bodywork were mostly dummies, they only contained a single reversing light and a single fog light.

I fancied changing these to fully functional lights for additional visibility on the road.

I started off by picking up some globe holders and bulbs from www.albertlooms.com scrapyard (plus a fuse board/relay holder for later on) for the bargain price of £10!

Back home I took the rear lights out and drilled holes in the back of them for the bulb holders. If you’re doing this yourself, have the light unit lens facing upwards and drill up through from the bottom. This makes it easier to clean out all the shards of plastic that come off the drill (as I found out the hard way). I drilled a rough oval shape so that the bulb holder tabs can still be used to secure them in the lights units.

The bulb holders seats were a little too wide, so I trimmed about 4mm off around the edge of each one so that they fit in the holes, and can still be twist-fitted in place.

The holders also came with their own harness which will make wiring up easier when I get round to it.

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Saturday 19th July – Wiring

Most Patrols already have the wiring harness in for the dummy light clusters, its just a case of tapping into these for power to the new bulbs.

Below is the nearside plug, which contains an indicator, tail, brake and reverse light.

The offside plug only has an indicator, brake and fog light wire, so I needed to run a cable from the nearside plug for the tail light and reverse light.
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Also replaced the red bumper bulbs with LEDs, to reduce the load on the circuit:

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Seeing as the existing fog light had been replaced by tail/brake lights, I needed to add a new one. I bought this cheap LED bar off ebay as a temporary replacement for now.

I sealed the joins in the bar with silicone – I only had white to hand, but i trimmed off the excess when it was dry and it will be mostly hidden by the bumper anyway so shouldn’t be too noticeable.

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The cable was threaded up through an existing grommet behind the rear wheel arch, and connected up.

Test run – all lights working:

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And the new fog light:

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