I wanted to bring you a success story today, but instead, today was a bit of a failure, so I’m going to tell you about it so you don’t make the same mistake I did…
The day started by completely stripping out the trunk, cutting with the dremel on the left side, and prepping the new wiring.
My idea for the wiring was to connect all the new lights to the positive wire of the existing trunk light, and connect each light to the nearest ground point for each light, to avoid running so many wires such long distances (this turned out to be the problem, I’ll explain why later).
Anyway, I was super happy because the lights were turning on, so I decided to put everything back together and call this mod complete.
Here are some photos from when I closed it all up.
And to be honest, I was really happy with how well the whole trunk lit up, but much to my surprise, when I closed the tailgate, the lights DIDN’T TURN OFF.
I was already aware that some cars do this, though I didn’t know it was the case here too…
It turns out the positive for the trunk light doesn’t just receive power when the trunk is open; it’s a circuit shared with several other lights that receives power basically whenever the car is unlocked.
And some of you might wonder, if that circuit (almost) always gets 12v, how is the light turning on and off controlled? Well, basically, instead of connecting the light to ground, it’s connected to the BCM, and the BCM is what connects or disconnects that wire from the car’s ground.
So anyway, since I didn’t have time today to redo all the ground wiring, I’ve disconnected the positive and left them off until next weekend when I can get everything finished.
