No parking or instrument cluster lights

20

Asked by Xander524 Aug 04, 2009 at 08:58 AM about the 1995 Dodge Spirit 4 Dr STD Sedan

Question type: Maintenance & Repair

My brother's 95 dodge spirit headlight switch fried (seriously the connector melted)which caused the headlight to intermittently work, killed the parking and instrument cluster lights. I replaced the headlight switch and the wiring connector and got the headlights to work but the parking lights and the instrument cluster lights is still out.
I checked all the fuses and the wiring the best  could but have no idea what else may have went wrong?

Signal, brake, headlight, all work great he just don't have parking and instrument lighting.

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

2 Answers

130

Xander, I had a similar problem with my daughter's 2003 Dodge Neon. I copied my post detailing how I fixed her can and will paste it here in hopes that it might help you or someone else: I ended up completely re-wiring everything on the same circuit as the instrument panel lights and tail lamps. The wire in the harness was black with a yellow stripe and it was the hot wire for the instrument panel, tail lamps, license plate light, front parking lights and the amber marker lights on the front fenders. At each of the eight connections, I cut the black with yellow wire, leaving enough to strip and connect to the new 18ga wire that I pulled throughout the car. For each connection, I used heat shrink connections. Additionally, even though all of the lights worked after re-wiring the hot side, I spliced into the ground wire for each connection (other than the instrument panel lights) and ran a good, solid ground to the car body for each of the seven connections. All of the ground connections may have been overkill, but I was tired of messing with those specific electrical problems and didn't want to leave anything to chance. The toughest part of the whole thing was pulling wire through the firewall. I finally used a stiff-bladed fish tape and poked a hole through a rubber plug in the firewall and pulled my wire through. I ran all of the wire under the hood, under the carpet and in the trunk through split plastic wire looms to protect against wear in the insulation of the wiring and to guard against future shorts. As I said, I was really tired of messing with Dodge Neon wiring. So far so good. I'm sure that a real mechanic would have done this much better than I did and my methods may provide a good laugh for a few folks. That's ok by me. In the end, all of the lights function again, and, since I "work cheap," the final repair bill was about $200 ($75 on ebay for the multifunction switch; $90 to the local Dodge parts department for the 20 pin plug; and about $35 for 18 ga wire, tape, plastic wire loom and shrink connector). Hopefully, all of this detail will help someone out by going through how an old Paramedic resuscitated some of the lights on a 2003 Neon. Richard

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