1948 Chev Christmas Lights

My good friend Paul Albertson from Oregon sent me this.Its a pretty cool idea. 

"I wanted to move to a bright LED bulb. Oregon state law requires cars to have only red or amber lights in the back, so I bought a set of all red lights, with the faceted bulbs. See picture. LED are fine for DC power. The string I bought is for 120 volt AC, so I divided the number of bulbs (60) into the voltage (120 v, wired for top & bottom sections of the sine wave) and determined it would need 6 bulbs in series to deal with the 12-14 volts of a car.

Now I needed to plan the function of each 6 bulb set. The old set had every other bulb either as the tail light or the brake light. This time I wanted to divide the brake light groups into three groups (two 6 bulb sections for each of the three groups). A left turn signal set, a right turn signal set and the center set driven by the 3^rd brake light circuit. Because these are diodes, one end is a ground and opposite end is positive for each 6 bulb set. Test with 12 v source and mark them so there are no wiring mistakes later. I noticed some bulbs were much dimmer than others, so I sorted out the dimmer ones.

I bought a used rear window trim ring from the auto salvage. It fits the rear window shape much nicer than the bar stock original effort. I divided the inside length by the number of bulbs I wanted and determined the spacing of each bulb. The inside edge of this trip piece is rolled under, so I used the cut-off grinder to make small slices into the trim ring. These notches become short tabs as I then un-roll short sections so they pointed toward the center of the window.

I used double stick tape (the foam style) to attach the light socket body to the tab. With the bulbs removed, I used shrink tube around the socket, tape and the tabs. The intent was to hide the mount into a general black background.

Soldered each bulb section to a different colored wire. Tucked the wires inside the trim ring and used small wire ties and electrical tape dress the wires. The wires drop down into the trunk from the bottom corners of the rear window.

A short test drive, and the Christmas lights work well. Headlight switch lights turn on the full ring of odd numbered lights. The brake pedal lights up left, center and right (or even numbered lights). Turn signal lights up either section of the even numbered lights. Works the same as standard tail lights."