Electrical problems

[1971ford]

I'll compile all my electrical problems into this thread as i just put the truck together and have a few things to sort out.

First off, when i push the brake pedal my parking lights come on (well not sure about the taillights because they arn't connected but both front turn signals light up, not blinking, but solid, as if i pulled the headlight switch first click). This is just weird. Where should i focus on this one?

Second, my headlights work fine. I hit the higbeam switch on the floor, and my drivers side headlight goes to highbeam and my passenger side headlight shuts off. Again, really weird. Any ideas?

I'm printing out wiring diagrams to use tomorrow but if you guys could point me in the right direction that would be great

[fordman]

for the second one the headlight bulb is bad for the highbeam side. for pushing the brake and the front parking lights coming on sounds like a wire or bulb is crossfedding the parking light circut. it may be something up under the dash that is touching.

[1971ford]

Headlight thing is good news, i'd rather swap it out in 1 minute than chase wiring. i'll swap out the bad headlight first thing tomorrow. I have many spares.

[ScreaminZ]

I had some weirdness like your parking light issue a while back. In my case, it turned out that my bed wasn't grounding to the frame. The bolts were all loose and everything was rusty. I haven't had time to cut out those bolts and redo everything yet, so as a temporary fix, I ran a ground wire between the frame and the bed. Problem solved. What was happening was the power going to the brake light was passing through the ground part of the bulb and back into the parking light part of the bulb, thus feeding that circuit with power. Took me quite a while to track that issue down!

The thing that finally made me realize what was wrong was when i touched my test light to the bed and found out that the bed itself was hot!

[1971ford]

thats funny

Would it do it if i dont have a bed on the truck though? Right now there is no bed and the brake light wiring is just danglign not hooked up to anything. I'll try hooking it up to the lights and grounding the lights to the frame...

[ScreaminZ]

There's no ground wire going to the tail light housings. It all grounds through the bed. You have to ground them.

[1971ford]

Ok I was going to make brackets bolting the taillights to the frame until i get the bed on anyways so that will ground them