Check the tail lights on this '67 - look different? Yep that is a yellow lens where the outside red lenses should be and yes, a yellow blinker is flashing on the left side!
Good old Ebay led me to a new blinker set up for Mustangs to give a new Australian or European tail light arrangement. The set I purchased is from a mob calling themselves The Mustang Project and replaces the blinker unit and the tail light set up completely. Instead of bulbs it uses LEDs which are brighter and more reliable.
I pulled the tail lights and put in the new system, but found it gave spurious results. AAAGH why why why?
Pull out the schematics, what a bloody nightmare . . . after a lot of research I discovered the brakes and the blinkers run a signal up the same wire to the same filament. This is because the Yanks used the same brake light as a blinker. Little wonder so many Mustangs have been shunted up the back, in modern traffic it is very difficult to be sure whether the blinkers are on or not.
The power for the brake lights is routed through the blinker switch. When the brakes are on, the blinker switch disconnects the brake light power to that side and applies the power from the blinker unit.
The Mustang Project lights are set up to work on that wiring arrangement. Problem is, my car has been rewired so a separate brake wire is used, thereby creating two independent wiring circuits for blinkers and brakes. This really screwed me , because I paid a heap of dough for the units and it appeared they could not work, unless I worked out how to the rewire the car's tail lights. Quite frankly, having already replaced the blinker switch in the past, a journey back up the steering column filled me with dread.
Unperturbed I told the guy who sold it to me and he referred me to the Americans who made it. I asked them if it could be modified to suit a separate brake wire set up. They were very helpful and told me that they could rewire it to suit my configuration if I paid the postage. So I sent it away and they did the deed.
This afternoon me and the boy (yes Mother I know it is bad grammar), fitted the new units, after testing they would work of course!
The result is great! We now have yellow blinkers in the tail lights and both the blinkers and brakes are much brighter than the original.
Here's a tip for you, if you buy a set and get them to change to suit your wiring, that has been modified like mine. They don't tell you but the long black crossover wire becomes the brake light wire and needs to be fed through a new hole in the tail light unit, which you need to drill.
The units do not blink with the same rhythm as the old blinkers and they do some strange brake flicking as you change the from left to right. But these idiosyncracies aside, the result is very good. The lights are very bright and unmissable, well done
Mustang Project!
