Getting ALL Your Interior Lamps To Light Up When A Door Is Opened

Contributed By: Scottie Sharpe

Wagoneer modification:

1 Banana

Getting ALL your interior lamps to light up when a door is opened and simultaneously mounting rear map lights.

It has always bugged the hell out of me that ALL my interior lamps do not illuminate when I open my front doors. I have traced the circuit diagram and can't make heads or tails of whether or not the front and rear interior lamp circuits do indeed have separate grounds. I have decided to alleviate that problem on my Wag.

Also I figured out that you can mount a front dome/map light to the in place of the rear dome cargo lamp. This is great on night trips when back seat passengers want to read. Just visit the junk yard (in my case, my back yard) and grab yourself a front dome/map light unit.

OK so let's do both jobs at once.

Remove the fuse or disconnect the batt. Remove the rear dome lamp and base from your rig and cast aside! Keep the two ground wires together. Pull back your rear headliner (or remove it...read on) and run a 16 or 18 black or brown wire from where the rear dome lamp used to be, down the rear of the rear door molding, under the carpet (with the other wires) to the front left kick panel. You'll need to remove your carpet hold down plates along the door sills. Locate the plug under the carpet near the fuse box with three wires on one side and four on the other. The two middle wires on the four wire side are crimped into the same hole. This middle group is the door switch ground circuit for the front doors. Crimp in your new wire to this circuit. Now you have attached all four door grounds together.

Attach the new ground wire to the other two ground wires for the rear dome lamp. Keeping all three ground wires together, crimp on an insulated female connector. Crimp an insulated female on the hot lead, too.

Take a look at the dome/map light you got. You'll see that the map lights extend out and will burn the headliner if you don't trim off a couple inches to either side of the current hole. Hold the lamp to the headliner. You'll see what I mean. So trim off that extra headliner--not too much--just enough to clear the three heat riser spacer on the top of the lamp. Put the headliner back together.

Push on the wires to the light. Hot is towards the front. Screw the lamp to the ceiling rail. You'll probably need some longer sheet metal screws--I did.

Connect your batt or fuse. Open your front door. Oooh! Look at that! Light! Lots of light! Switch on those rear map lamps! Oooh! Ahhh!

--Scottie Sharpe
'88 GW

FSJ Bumpers and Nerfs