VCCA Home Forums TECHNICAL - 1945 AND EARLIER 1929-1932 Making a tail light brighter

Spoke the guy who refinishes the headlight reflectors yesterday. I use a halogen bulb for the tail light and it doesn't help very much (I have a plastic lense), he suggested lining the tail light housing with tin foil.
Did it today and there's a noticable improvement. Simple and inexpensive.
Thought I'd pass it along.

be careful with halogen tail light bulbs if of a higher wattage you might need to install a circuit breaker fuse of 40 AMPS so you do not burn out your stop light switch with the voltage load.

Also high wattage halogen bulbs create a lot of heat, if you find yourself stuck in traffic with your foot on the brake,for a while, you might find your plastic tail light lens all melted or distorted.

Don't ask how i know this........lmao

mike

karl31, I have a 31 AE & I use glass lense with the halgone bulb & they work great & bright. Grease monkey

I used Chrome spray paint inside my tail light. Brightness was greatly improved.

Wish I thought about using the chrome paint-would have been much easier than gluing in tin foil.

White paint will make the tail light brighter as well.

One thing we did on ours was to add a few LED's within the space surrounding the bulb. We added 4 and when you hit the brakes they are bright. Space is tight but you can have both the bulb and some added LED's for a brighter more noticeable brake light.

The addition of LED's sound interesting. Can you supply more information on how you accomplished it.

The Filling Station sells a whole insert with LED's that goes into the regular tail light housing.

I tried all of the above and finally spent the money and bought the led kit from the FS. Worth the investment. I feel so much safer now, they show up bright even in full sunlight. The modern cars following you respond just as thought you were driving your modern car.

Let me take some pictures and post them. We use a scrap piece of plastic to hold the LED's in place and wired them in tight near the bulb. Its 6volt and you wouldn't otherwise know they are there until you hit the brakes.

Since that worked my dad also added a blue LED to the running light bulb lines. Not sure I would recommend that as the blue LED is super bright and you can see the car/blue LED from a good distance. I'm sure one day we'll get pulled over for it :)

Sorry for the long delay but I also have a mutt of a 32 and started to build a 6V LED add-on to make the tail light brighter. Its not a true 32 Chevy tail light housing but you get the idea. The LED's are form a Christmas Tree light set. The best way to get bright LED's cheap! We did have to add in a small resistor to each LED and they are all wired in Parallel. We got a small 6V battery that is very helpful when testing things out on your bench. It can take a few tries to discover if you need a resistor and how much of one that will do. Again here having a 50+ sting of LED's makes them a little disposable as you learn verses buying them at $2 a piece from Radio Shack.

Its not done but ready for posting at least, still need to cut out the center and mount.

Frosendo - I am very interested in your tail light conversion. Actually in addition to our 31 Chevy we have a street rod with a custom tail light assembly that runs the entire width of the back end and is approximately 8" tall. So - wondering if I can fabricate the LED lighting panel since the old bulbs never were that effective. Do you have a resource on the basics of this such as resister requirement, max number of lamps on a circut, etc. Would like to learn more and take this on as a project this summer.
Thanks!!
31ChevyGuy

I had the idea this could be a nifty way to "add" turn signals to my vehicle, w/out disturbing the original lights and wiring etc.
Yes, Please tell us more about this resistor requirement..I didn't see anything in the photo...

Hi John, We use these same LED's for another hobby R/C Boats and night runs. On one we have 24 of these white LED's in parallel with no trouble. From what I read people suggested to wire LED's serial but in this way you can only get 3-4 on a strand. Anything we've done the parallel circuit worked just fine for our needs and we've not seen any odd or varying luminescence from the LED's as suggested. Give it a go, while it may be harder to find a Christmas tree light set for sale maybe you can get one and some resistors. We currently are using 100Ohm resistors but while that works great on the bench in practice we have lost some LED's. Pretty sure its the generator kicking in additional voltage that is causing the blowout. We are going to move up to 150 or maybe 200 Ohm's and see what impact that might have on the brightness. I have some more pics that I will upload shortly.

Hi Kevin47, this is how we started with the LED's actually trying for a more hidden turn signal. The idea can work BUT we ran into a few things that we ended up just using the LED's to make the default tail lights brighter.

Thermal flashers won't work with LED's so we got an electronic one and it technically worked but something was wrong where we would only get 3volts out of it so we went back to the thermal flasher and opted to use bulbs up front with some extra LED's to help. Here we tried 6volt/4 cell Krypton Mag-Light replacement bulbs ... WOW ... these bulbs are crazy bright! With that the thermal flasher worked fine and functioned for the rear LED and front bulb turn signals. Those Mag-Light bulbs were so bright we just used them in the back too.

We're using LED's to enhance the interior lighting too by the way. A great way to add light under the dash for the front seat area with low power consumption. Here a 4 LED panel from LED Warehouse worked fine and was only $10. Another area we are adding LED's is under the hood. So many times folks ask to see the engine and at night its tough but these LED's are small, easy to hide, low power drain and work great. You can be a little creative/artistic here on how you chose to light up the engine

Take a look a the Christmas light LED's we used as seen in the pic below, these give a nice spread of light. The typical dome type LED's are very bright head on but after a few degree's from normal they tend to really drop off in brightness.

On the 31 the Hot/red wires work like a "crown" on the bulb and with this method they are easy to remove and involve no permanent change to the original housing.

last pick shows the front turn signals on the 32, tucked under the fenders but again VERY bright with the Mag-Light bulbs.

Thanks frosendo...! Are you using one resistor for each LED light...? I was wondering if their hiding under the shrink-wrap...

Hi Kevin47, yes that right. One resister per LED on the positive terminal.