Tail Lights: A solution to our Chinooks weird wiring

[Steeldriver17]

I recently set about to fix the "problem" of the way Chinook wired the tail lights/brake lights/turn signals on our rigs. You may or may not know, but instead of running the lights on the rear of the Chinook the way ford runs them on the e-series vans from the factory, Chinook tapped into the trailer/camper harness at the rear of the drivers side frame rail. They also added something like 40 feet of wire running from the trailer connector, back up to the dash into a fuse, then all the way back to the tail lights. This poses 2 potential problems:

1: Most importantly to me, you don't get brake lights when you have your hazards on, and,
2: If you have a trailer with a lot of non LED lights on it, it can easily blow the fuse

So here is what I did.

I went to a self service junkyard and found a 1996 E150 that had the old style tail lights with amber turn signals. The ones where the turn signals and the brake lights were still separate bulbs in separate lenses. I removed the factory Ford harness for this and brought it home and wired it into the Chinook.

Here is the Ford factory harness.

Now on all E-series vans that weren't cutaways, or cab and chassis, there is a rectangular connector at the base of the pillar behind the drivers seat. The Ford factory harness plugs into this connector and powers everything in the rear of the van: Speakers, interior and exterior lights, etc... From what I can tell, cutaways still have this connector, but don't even have the wiring running to this connector for tail lights. I assume they did this because they assumed that cutaways such as ambulances, campers, box trucks, etc, would have their own solution to wiring exterior rear lights.

Here is the rectangular connector I am talking about.

Now because this rectangular connector doesn't have any of the wires I need (except for the running lights), I had to figure out where the 5 wires that I need for Running Lights, Brake Lights, Left Turn Signal, Right Turn Signal, and Reverse Lights are and re-route them to here so I could plug a Ford factory harness in.

The left and the right turn signals were pretty simple because on my Chinook they used the factory wires. Under the dash, right next to the fuse box, coming out of a harness is a square, grey connector. The left and right turn signal wires are in this connector. On my 98 the colors were light green with a white tracer, and white with a light blue tracer. Now as I mentioned, Chinook didn't use the trailer wiring for the turn signals on my van. They actually ran their own harness from the dash to the rear along the drivers side frame rail, right next to the trailer/camper wiring harness. This "sub harness" had these 2 wires tapped into the factory ford wires as well as the several runs of wire for the running lights that run back and forth to and from the auxiliary fuse block and the "schnozzles" (I think that's what blue-go calls them).

Here is the square grey connector with the turn signal wires in the bottom left of this picture.

On the e series vans, this is not how they ran the turn signals. The turn signal wires were just routed in the main harness under the drivers step and went to the rectangular connector. I am not even sure what this square connector is there for, but all 16 e series vans at the junk yard had this same connector, it was just unused. Oh well, works well for my purposes. I plugged in the other end of the connector, spliced in some extra factory Ford wiring of the proper colors that i snagged from the junk yard (green with an orange tracer and orange with a blue tracer), and ran them back to the location of the connector behind the drivers seat.

Next up was the brake lights. In this same location on the pillar behind the drivers seat, there is a plug that is for something called a "center mounted brake light" or something like that. Some E-series vans had a third brake light on the roof above the rear doors. It is a 2 wire connector, with a green and a black wire. On our Chinooks, it just has a dead end plugged into it that loops back into itself.

(It appears I can't add any more attachments to this post. I'll submit the post and keep typing in a reply.)

[Steeldriver17]

Here is the brake light connector with the green wire I used.

Running lights were the easiest. The grey, rectangular connector already had a brown wire coming into it for running lights. I snipped that wire and used it.

The reverse lights get their signal from a black wire with a pink tracer coming out of the Transmission Range Sensor on the side of the transmission. I crawled underneath the cab, cut this wire, spliced in a black/pink wire from the donor van, reconnected everything, and ran this wire to the location behind the drivers seat.

[Steeldriver17]

Now I have the 5 wires I need ran to what would have been a factory location. You can see them all here.

Next I had to take the connector that I took from the donor van (same as our grey rectangular connector, only on non cutaway vans it was black) and wire these into it so I could just plug the factory harness into it. I removed all the wires from the black rectangular connector that was on the junkyard van and just left the 5 wires I needed in it.

All that was left to do was connect this to the 5 wires, plug in the factory harness, plug that harness into my tail light housings, and test it all out. For testing purposes, I only connected everything temporarily so I could make sure everything worked as it should.

And Voila! Everything worked exactly as it should. I now have all my tail lights wired up exactly-ish as they would have been from the factory. This freed up the trailer wiring connectors to be used for what they were intended for, trailer wiring. All I have left to do is tape everything up, put wire loom on it, and zip tie the wiring harness in place.

Now here's the thing. This would probably be pretty difficult to do if you still had the interior in your chinook. Over a year ago, the engine went out on my chinook. Instead of putting a new triton v10 in it, I bought a 7.3 diesel ambulance and am in the process of swapping my chinook shell onto the ambulance chassis. All these pictures you see here are actually on the ambulance chassis. I am not a fan of the Triton V10. A lot of people love this engine, but I think it's garbage. It's a dog, it spits out spark plugs, gets terrible gas mileage, and I just really dig diesel. I grew up loving big diesel trucks, the 7.3 by International is one of the most legendary, reliable engines every made, it has great characteristics for towing, or in our case, just hauling around a heavy camper. Plus, it has the cool, rare, I have a power stroke diesel chinook factor as well. I also really enjoy tackling projects like this, and I am having a blast doing it.

Also, the interior of my chinook is completely (and I mean completely) gutted. I finally moved into a house on a piece of property with a proper wood shop so I will be completely rebuilding the interior of the chinook to my liking. It's going to have a modern, lithium powered solar system, I'm getting rid of the shower, and doing a bunch of other cool modifications. So I will have a whole slew of guts pictures for you guys, as well as a bunch of pictures of the chassis swap once I have it ready to go.

Hope this was helpful!