Mark,
This doesn't add up to me.
All six taillamps are on the same circuit as each other (both years), and all
four or six brake/turn lamps (for 67 or 68, respectively) were on another
circuit. A failure in the taillamp circuit will not substitute a brake lamp, so
if the fuse for all of your parking lamps blew, you'd be driving around with no
taillamps. If your brake lamp fuse blew (or some other circuit failure
occurred), you'd have no brake lamps but it would not affect your taillamps.
Further, it was perfectly legal in 1967, 1968 and is still legal to have a
single dual-filament bulb per side in the rear of the car (a Ford Focus or
Dodge neon has just such a set-up).
The only safety benefit I can imagine from the 1968 setup would be that having
the inner lamp not used by the brake and turn signals, a non-flashing turn
signal would be slightly more obvious at night (because you could see that part
of the lamp is brighter).
Honestly, I think they just did it to save a few cents, or chances are some
people might have complained that the giant brake lamps of the '67 were too
bright to cars following at night. One things for sure, the 67 certainly
compensated for the tiny brake lamps of the '64-66!
Chris in LA
67 Crown
78 NYB Salon
-------Original Message-------
From: Mark McDonald <tomswift@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: 06/27/03 10:53 AM
To: mailing-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: IML: Fixing Govt mandated 68 bulb problems: was bulbs for
'68taillights
>
> I believe the rationale was that if there was a malfunction with one set
of lights, say the brake lights, and both were on the same system, that
you would then lose the taillights as well and the car would be nearly
invisible from behind at night. In other words, they wanted to insure
that at least some lights were always on and working on the back of the
car to prevent rear end collisions. The compromise John refers to, I
guess, is that they didn't create 2 separate systems but used different
bulbs (?).
It seems hard to believe now, with well lighted roads and cars with huge
taillights, but way back when it wasn't uncommon for a car to come up on
another car from behind at night, and the driver of the 2nd car might
not even see the first car until they hit. Even with working
taillights, some of the fixtures were so small that if the bulb was bad
or the light got dirty you couldn't see the car and whammo.
Mark
Christopher Hoffman wrote:
> The government made them kill the third brake/turn bulbs for '68? Why?
>
> Chris in LA
> 67 Crown
> 78 NYB Salon
>
> John in Atlanta (Imp67cc64@xxxxxxx) wrote:
>
> Dick has a point. Another line of attack to correct your problem
> would be to get two bulb sockets with a bit of wiring from a junkyard
> and convert your taillight only sockets to signal/brake/taillight
> sockets. All would use 1157s and so you would eliminate the
> bright/dim problem while fixing something the govt made Chrysler
> compromise on in 1968. As you know, I am a stickler for original, but
> I did this on the 68 conv I had and would not hesitate to do it on any
> subsequent 68's I own.
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