My working on the car in snatches, bits and pieces here and there continues...

On the list of now working:

- turn signals
- reverse lights (!)
- tail lights

Still not working:

- brake lights

So the state and fate of the car has been a sorry saga this last week and a half. First the "light out" warning light came on, presumably for the right tail light that was out.

It was not as simple as blown bulb, nor as simple as a causelessly-blown fuse. Because I checked the bulb, and it lit up fine in the other socket, or with 12V applied directly to it, and fuses kept blowing when I changed them.

So I cut the wires to instrument panel bulbs (they didn't work anyway) after much measuring with the multimeter and much analytical and mathematical thinking.

I had logically (and then physically & electrically) isolated the source of the short. I re-applied the now tail-light-only circuit to the fuse box, and the fuses held and the tail light lit.

It was at this point, that, to my dismay, I realized that the brake lights no longer worked. How long had it been going on? Certainly longer than since cutting that wire, so that was ruled out as a cause...

Well, the brake lights are still not lighting, except for the middle one, which I plugged into my switch-controlled aux circuit. Yes, that's right, I have to flip a switch to light my brake lights, (hopefully) synchronized with my actual braking (or not -- BACK OFF! I'm slowing down! But not really! Actually I'm accelerating! But you stay back there!).

Tomorrow I track the brake pedal switch wire to the relay and re-wire the back brake lights.

In other good news, I found the wire that goes to the reverse lights, and I don't think they have EVER worked since we owned the car. They are now actuated by a clear white light (which matches the reverse lights themselves) switch coming out of the center lower dash area.

The turn signals were a casualty of this week. I was working on other things (the brake lights), and thinking of how I could extend the turn signal switch to be actuate-able with one hand whilst that one hand also grips the steering wheel. During that brainstorming, I attached a handle to the existing switch... And about a minute later I put too much pressure on it and snapped off the handle from the existing switch. So today I rewired the turn signals into two SPST, momentary-contact, normally off switches, ones with big RED buttons...