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There are three or four basic lights that I need to add to this truck. Starting from the obvious are plow lights. I managed to get some vintage Dietz round lights from a guy in South Dakota who apparently found a warehouse full of them. These are going to look just right on this rig.

Another obvious need for a work truck is a roof-mounted beacon. Although I have a nifty magnetic strobe with a cigarette lighter plug, my neighbor, John, covets it as being nicer than the one a customer gave him after nearly getting hit while John was plowing his auto repair shop's parking lot one night. So I will probably give it to him to put on his new 2004 GMC plowing, boat towing, and dog snuggling truck.

And anyway, I have this vintage Dietz (there we go again) beacon, with two sealed beam lights on a motorized carousel, that would look much more at home on this machine. Yes, that is a crack that has been sealed (years ago) with epoxy you can see. Just like the Liberty Bell, except it hasn't been repaired. Hey, I can't be picky about what I found in the attic of my building when I bought it!

Now we get to the fun part. Lights I don't really "need," but really want. Easy to understand is my desire for a set of loading lights, up high behind the cab. Less important, but cool nonetheless, are a set of high-mounted park/brake/turn lights - "Liddy Lights" with pizazz!

These will both be mounted on some sort of rear window guard frame. Once upon a Ford, my reverse/loading lights used a three position switch, one for "on with reverse", a center off position for normal life, and an "always on" position for simplicity when plowing and times when I need to see what is in the bed or behind me while not driving backwards.

I did things slightly differently this time, but here be the basic wiring configuration:

A picture of the lights in place (oops, look, I reconfigured my magnet mount/cigarette lighter powered strobe to be screwed down and hard wired to the dashboard switch):

The park/brake/turn lights are simply hooked up to a trailer adapter I plugged in at the rear of the bed and connected forward down the frame rail and up to the window guard. The loading lights are hard-wired to a dashboard switch, and I will use the fourth wire in the trailer harness (which is not attached to the reverse signal like it could be, but intended to be a ground wire) to connect them also to the backup light circuit - but with a diode and resistor in the circuit. The diode will make it so the dash switch does not turn on the bed mounted reverse lights (handy so people behind me can tell I am not in reverse any more), and the resistor will make it so that, although the loading lights come on with the reverse gear, they won't be as bright - mostly to be nice to people in parking lots near me.