Gauge illumination

[Zs-ondabrain]

Well there ya go. It's not the rheostat at all. Your parking light circuit is bad.

This is why I tell everyone to check the fuses.

Put a new fuse in there and try again. If that don't work, check the switch.

When you say R/B are you talking red/blue or red/black?

Dave.

[EScanlon]

Dave you're spot on, I meant Red/Blue and kept abbreviating it as Red/Black. (And exactly why Datsun used L for blue, to avoid the confusion with black.)

Been working on a friend's Mustang.

E

[geezer]

Not to take you guys away from the troubleshooting, but the wire color confusion made me think of this. Because my eyes are not so good anymore I bought one of those oversized color wire diagrams. It was worth it just for the laugh I got when I seen the wire color legend.

[rdefabri]

Well there ya go. It's not the rheostat at all. Your parking light circuit is bad.

This is why I tell everyone to check the fuses.

Put a new fuse in there and try again. If that don't work, check the switch.

When you say R/B are you talking red/blue or red/black?

Dave.

Dave,

Thanks - keeping my fingers crossed that it's a fuse. I'll also rewire the red / blue radio wire accordingly...it's possible that I did what Enrique said (e.g., viewed from bottom, it's reversed on top - D'OH!).

When you say check the switch - you mean the combination switch?

[EScanlon]

Connect power TO the Red/BLUE wire that connects to the rheostat. Your instrument lights should all come on.

If they do NOT, then your problem is "upstream", meaning towards the combination switch as that is where the Green/White connects to the current coming from the combination switch.

But since you've already determined that you do NOT have Parking lamps, you need to determine if the fuse for the Parking Lamps (3rd down on Right) is good, and if it is (again no visual checks, pull it out and do a continuity check on it or replace it with a known good one) then you need to see if the combination switch has lost a connection (broken solder joint) or isn't making good contact (open switch and rebuild) if either of these either repair/rebuild the switch yourself or send to Dave for re-work.

But the critical portion of this is to isolate the problem to, hopefully, a single ground, wire or component.

FWIW

E

[rdefabri]

Ok - now I'm mildly embarrassed! It was the fuse, it was blown. Not only should I have known that would be the place to start, I now recall when that fuse was blown. I was crimping some wires together, and the crimping tool contacted the fuse. I saw it spark, but didn't think it was anything. That was definitely when the fuse blew because everything was fine up until that day.

In any event, I truly appreciate all the help from everyone. I can honestly say I may have been looking for some time if I wasn't told to check the fuse. Can't believe I missed it, but I guess I could blame old age, right???

Thanks again, it's all working proper now!!

[leemanzman]

By the way, the original radio only put out about *3.5W into 4Ω Mono.

If you hook up two 4Ω speakers in series, you'll over load and overheat the radio by a total of 8Ω in the circuit, twice what it was designed for.

EScanlon,

I know this is an old post, but your assumptions about the speaker wiring are backwards. A 2-ohm load on the radio will cause it to run too hot and potentially short. The 8-ohm load will reduce the power output by half which will be very safe, but not as loud. Your statment about series and parallel wiring is spot on though.

[Mr Camouflage]

Yeah, I noticed that was wrong when I read it.