BII Cargo light upgrade

[unoleisu]

I thought someone might want to see what I did. Hope it's helpful.
I wanted to replace the OEM cargo light that was dim and old looking. I pulled a dome light assembly from a 97 Exploder I have laying around. A quick search through my wireing diagrams showed me the wireing matched, except for connectors, and the BII has a ground wire. The EXP grounds to it's bracket, which grounds to the body.

 

[unoleisu]

I removed the bracket from the 97 EXPL, it had two mounting screws, but had to tear the headliner to get it out. The wireing connectors were attached, and I cut them about 6 inches back. After I soddered narrowed spade connectors to the ends, I made up a black ground wire with a narrowed spade on one end, and an eye on the other. Then I drilled a hole on the bracket and screwed on the ground. I also modified the bracket by cutting a hole to match the BII bracket hole, by placeing the bracket in position behind the headliner and marking the hole position. I had to bend thetab on the mounting end so the bracket would sit flush.
Then I cut out a small part of the BII headliner so the new light would mount up and seat right. I ended up drilling new mounting holes in the BII sheet metal for the bracket mount screws, and after mounting, found I needed to stuff some closed cell foam ( 3, 1/2" pieces stacked together) to hold the bracket out enough to get the dome light screws to grab. I inserted the spades into the matching colored wires at the OEM BII connector, and used the center hole already there in the dome light to hold it secure to the bracket.
I only blew one fuse while testing the light with aligator clips before all the mods.

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

Looks good!

Richard

 

[unoleisu]

Thanks, I like it. I tried it out in the dark. Works alot better than original.

Note: Looking closely at the back side pic of the EXPL dome light, you can see where a sharpy says (pos) and (neg). DISREGARD THAT. It is not correct. The ground is the screw with the raised plastic circle around it. The other two screws are both positive. The one marked (neg) is actually for the light green / yellow wire, which feeds the dome light, the one marked (pos) is the black/ light blue wire that feeds the map lights (switches)

I'll have to watch my sharpy more carefully, it does things like that sometimes.......

 

[CopyKat]

 

[unoleisu]

Might find this interesting also.

http://www.broncoii-ranger.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=2464

Cool. Thanks! I didn't bother checking to see if anyone else had done this mod. Just thought it would be a good little project. I like having the lights seperate though.

 

[The_Dealer]

sweet, gonna be doing that really soon, thts exactly like what i wanted to do for some super cargo lighting

thanks for the write up

 

[ragajungle]

Thats a great idea
I am copying you!

 

[TexCaliBII]

Great idea! I put that light in as replacements on both my BIIs but never thought about putting one in the rear. One question though, why cut a BII mount hole in the Ex bracket?

 

[unoleisu]

Ah, excellent question. The EXP bracket had the wiring running off the side thru a channel (as reguired for the wireng in a dome light application), and in the new application it needed to go thru the middle. My foggy logic decided that the original BII hole was great for access to the wireing and I decided to duplicate the easy access. A hole needed to be there i the middle of the bracket for the wiring to go thru, it just didn't Have to be that size. the size just made it alot easier to connect/ dis-connect the dome light wires without messing with the bracket in the future.

I'm thinking about going to the salvage yard and gettig another one for the dome light replacement now, since this worked out so well.

 

[K-Slice]

Any chance I could get your old cargo light? Mines missing everything but the bulb socket.