Thursday, October 29, 2009

Tail light wiring and Harbor Freight

My accomplishment for today was to wire the new trailer light harness in the Camry.  I purchased the wiring yesterday at Autozone.

Japanese autos have amber turn signals that are independent of the brake lights.  Older cars had red turn signals and used the same bright bulbs and wiring for both functions.  The Doolittle utility trailer is wired the older way.  It is referred to as a four wire system.

So the wiring harness has a conversion box in the middle, that changes the amber individual turn signal, five wire system back into four wire.  This sounds much harder than it actually is.  On the connection side of the box there are five wires, and you simply connect them up.

I went over to to yet another Auto parts dealer, O'Rielly, and found the little T connectors that crimp on the existing wires.  Once installed, you just plug in the new harness.

Toyota even uses the same color scheme as the harness, except for the brake light, which was blue in the car, and red on the harness.

It seemed to work, when I backed the car over to the trailer, except I couldn't see if the brake lights worked since I was all alone.

In the afternoon, I went over to Harbor Freight.  I purchased some additional tools that I can leave in the coach full time.  The big tool box in the garage is too big to take with us, and I don't like taking stuff out because you never remember to switch it back again.  That is untill you go to use it the next time and its not there.

But I am tool box poor, and I really never know where something might be untill I put out the all points search party.  Darn, I know I own one of those, if I could just find it.  This is further problematic because some things are at the house in Lake Ozark.

So all of this is to describe me as a really good customer at Harbor freight.

This evening is kind of the lull before the all out push to pack up in the next few days.

Retired Rod

2 comments:

  1. I'm with you on the tool box thing, Rod. I bought an toolbox for my 5'er last year and stocked it with what I needed just because of what you said. Once I moved tools from my workshop out to the 5'er, I may as well kiss them goodbye! They just never seem to get back to the same spot again.

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  2. Upper you guys sure do need to be prepared with tools just likw we need the cooking gadgets... LOL LOL Have fun packing up for the trip...

    Travel Safe
    Donna

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