[njsteve]

More electrical progress. Mopars seem to be notorious for tail light issues with bad grounds. If you dont grind the heck out of the mounting area that the potmetal tail light housings mate up with, you risk intermittent light issues and backfeeding through the harness. Symptoms are cascading lights (alternating bulbs activating in a sequence) when you hit the brakes or the reverse lamps glowing dimly when the parking lights go on.

This car had no working license plate light, left rear marker light, and the dimly lit back-up lights glowing when the parking lights were on. If you use an alligator clip and wire to ground, they work fine as a test.

So the choice is pulling everything apart and gouging through new paint or the logical solution of just making some small jumper ground wires. So I got some spare 16 gauge wire and eyelet ends. I ran one from the side marker housing to the tail lamp housings and then to a prexisting screw behind the trunk latch bracing. None of it is visible to the prying eye. As for the license plate light, I had to pull the small potmetal housing out, and grind the area where the socket snaps into the housing. The galvanized coating and old finish just wouldn't let the grounding work. Once I did that, we had all the lights working as they should.

The crazy thing is that the factory uses a separate, designated ground wire for the headlight harness and front, grill mounted turn signals that screws to the radiator support but never bothered to do the same for the tail light harness.

Next fix, is doing the same jumper wire deal for the dash housing because the instrument panel lamps seem to pop the 3-amp "LPS" fuse intermittently. Cudas and Challengers used the gauge pod mounting screws and the little metal tabs under specific screw locations to be the grounds. If one of those tabs is gone, like on the switch pod that houses the headlamp switch, you get the grounding issue problem.