Illuminated Rear Reflectors

In addition to the parts above, decide how you want to connect the wiring, whether by soldering or using crimp/butt connectors and vampire taps. If you know how to solder, you know what to do already. If you are a budding electrician, crimp connectors and vampire taps are easiest, so the list will be:

• 1. 4 feet minimum of 18 gauge wire

  2. 4 18-gauge vampire taps (2 for each side)

  3. 4 18-gauge butt connectors to lengthen the harness pigtails

  4. Crimper/Wire Stripping tool

You'll need to go to the autoparts store and get the side marker sockets. As of April 2003, these cost me $6.99 USD each. I used parts 84803, because the socket is made or rubber, rather than hard plastic. You'll see in my installation, the rubber sockets are easily installed. If you use the plastic sockets, you'll not only have to cut a whole in the reflector, but also cut areas for the socket tabs to lock into. In addition to this, the rubber ones are very soft and malleable, which allows for a good amount of error tolerance for handmade socket holes. Believe it or not, I had to go to nine auto parts stores to find a pair of these stupid things, and when I did find each of them (at different stores) they were the last ones on the rack. Maybe just bad luck, who knows. This is a picture of the packages they came in. The pink looks like the old packaging, just in case you're misguided into only looking for the new packaging. Still, it's only made by one company, and this was the brand sold at all the various autoparts stores I searched.

You're all ready! These first few steps you can do in you home, I'll let you know when it's time to step outside! Do something easy for that sense of accomplishment. Put the bulbs in the sockets.

Time to connect the basic wiring. Cut the 18 guage wire into 4 equal footlong pieces. Take these 4 wires, and the wires on each of the sockets, and strip them all 1/4" back, and then join one of the 18 gauge wires to each wire on the bulb sockets. You can either connect them with the 18 gauge butt connectors and crimper, or solder the wires together as in the example.

If you crimped the wires together with butt connectors, move to the next step. If you used solder, then apply the heat shrink tubing over your joins.

Go outside, with your Phillips head screwdriver, and remove both rear reflectors from the car. When you come back in, carve out holes in the back of the reflectors. The package for each socket should say the diamater of the socket, so drill a hole roughly to that size (in this case, 15 mm). The fastest route would probably be a drill or rotary tool, but it was not too hard to use a hobby blade either. To do this step, I carved away with an X-acto knife instead. If you haven't done this before, please be careful! I started by taking the point of the blade and simply spinning it around. I carved a rough hole until I thought it was big enough for the socket (excluding the socket tabs).

Here is a picture of the socket. When I refer to the socket tabs, I'm referring to this area, where it would normally lock the socket into the fixture.

Take the X-acto knife, and cut the bottom/base area of the socket away, leaving the top area uncut. You just want to cut out that small, squarish bit falling off as shown by the tip o fthe blade. This effectively makes it possible to simply pop the socket right into the whole without using the twist-lock method. If you're using plastic sockets, you'd probably want to cut grooves into the reflector holes to accept the socket tabs.

Pop the sockets into the reflectors. Ah, a perfect friction fit!

Time to go outside again with your new rear lights, the ratchet, screwdriver, pliers and 4 splicing connectors. Remove the Phillips head screw from the top of the rear lights.

Inside the trunk area 8 plastic screws: just below the trunk lock, 8" below the trunk lock, and three to the left and right of the trunk lock. Removed, they look like this.

To remove them, you'll see it's a two-piece connector. I simply took my thumbnail, and easily lifted the centerpiece. This alows the whole connector to come out with little effort.

I removed the whole rear lining. Then, I removed the screws at the top of the rear light housing.

Behind each rear light housing are two gold bolts. Remove these with the ratchet.

Carefully, but firmly, pull the light fixture out. It has plastic friction snaps, so you'll hear a lot of clicking. One note - the top area where the screw was removed ended up hindering removal, so I lifted this over the trunk body, and it helped a lot. Be careful not to scratch your paint!

Reinstall your rear reflectors. Fish the wires back, and up through the bumper. It should be routed up to the rear light easily. Locate the black and white wires that run to the outermost light fixture on the tail lamp. Connect each black and white wire with one of the 18 gauge wires (doesn't matter which) from the new bulb socket using the splice connectors and pliers as shown.

Reinstall all parts, turn on the parking lights to see your new reflectors - I mean lights!