Interior Dash Lights Dont Work

Cougar Community Classic Cougar Maintenance Restoration and Repair
1

All other interior lights work. Switch “seems” to work, turns on parking lights, headlamps, and twisting it turns on the courtesy lamps. I tore apart the dash and replace and inspeced all bulbs. Still, no lights, Cant see the dash at all at night, makes it hard to see the speedo. I literally spent about 5 hours today just on this issue. Any ideas??

Also, just to note…the taillights, the sequentials work, and theparking lights work, hoever it sees the previous owner drilled and install two lights for the brake lights :bloated: He wired it in to the harness from the sequential box. They work when the pedal is pressed, just not sure why he did this…

2

Any chance the car has had an after market radio put in it?

3

Yup, actually it does.

4

Most likely they mistook the radio illumination wire for a ground, and shorted out the dash lights. This blows the fuse, or burns out the rheostat element in the headlight switch. Check the radio wiring before you go any farther.

5

Thank you! I will look at this as soon as i get home. I looked at the fuse panel and noticed he had the radio wired in to a blank spot. He grounded it to the chassis. Which fuse would be for the dash lights?

Again thanks for the help,

6

I had the same problem with my '71 XR7. The radio fried some wiring. After replacement only the light from the lightswitch worked. I cut the wiring on the right side of the steering wheel and made a connection with the left side. (the bulbs are all leds, so that should be no problem).
All the lights work now except for the warning lights in the dash (brake - park - door < and >). Fuse seems ok.
What can be the problem?

7

Just wanted to update…My rheostat on my lightswitch had bad corroded connections. I took out the light switch and cleaned the hell out of it, used some sand paper on the connections, and tested the resistance between the rheostat connections to make sure as it dimmed the resistance went up.

ALL dash lights now work as they should even dummy lights. The illumination lights are a bit hard to see, kinda dim, but if its completely dark you can at least see the speedo.