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I am finishing up the top bows on my ’35 845 Club Sedan and re-discovered (after 15 years) it had a dome light attached between the rear bows in addition to the rear corner light fixtures. I found mine in a box of parts swaddled in 1965 newspapers. It is an oblong ellipse and I am wondering two things:
1) how was it oriented, long dimension fore and aft or side to side in the car?
2) switch logic: do all three rear interior lights come on together, either from the door open switch or the rear pillar switch? The electric schematics do not show the rear body light wiring and my new harness doesn’t have those included.
Thanks for any help, Jim
The long dimension is fore and aft.
It has a two-filament bulb; one (along with the corner lights and vanity lights, if present) is controlled by the rear pillar switch, the other one by the door open switch. I chose to have the brightest filament on the door open circuit.
My ’29 works exactly as Bob has described.
I have always heard the lights in the corners referred to as ‘opera lights’.
Is that correct or are they really called something else?
That answers the questions, thanks for the responses! “Opera”” lights seems fitting given their design.
Jim”
Jim,
As an aside, if you are rewiring them anyway, you may want to run an extra wire as a ground. Connections corrode, and you won’t want to remove the headliner in the event the ground path or another wire fails.
We had a discussion a while back about adding a wire connection to the chicken wire in the roof for the antenna connection. Best to solder it if you can.
Bob
Based on the 2 cars I have with burned roofs, the ground is an excellent point.
The ground wire in these cars was originally a solid bare copper wire, while an end connection might corrode, it’s hard to think that the solid wire itself would suffer.
I once put an insert in a 1932 Brougham, and it too had a charred roof! Once I removed the old top, it was nothing but black charcoal holding the top up. Only thing we could figure was the dome light shorted and the wood just smoldered, never really flaming.
Craig,
The 1937 Pierce-Arrow sales booklet lists “dome and corner lights”” as “”among the appointments””.”
I will add a ground wire. Certainly scary to think of the connection smoldering to the point of causing the bows to turn to charcoal!
I have debated about using the chicken wire for the antenna. I did that on my ’36 Packard – keeping it isolated from the metal body and coax to the radio. I am not sure if it was too good or simply bad, the end result was that AM reception is completely trashed by the engine, even when switching to resistor spark plug wire. It doesn’t really matter since there is nothing “authentic” to listen to on AM anyway. To listen to authentic music I have a AM/FM/USB hidden in the driver side glovebox so that I can play authentic music – queue Tommy Dorsey.
The negative ground stereo is isolated from the positive ground car and powered with a 6/12 upconverter. FM reception is okay but pretty marginal -it will pick up engine sparking unless the FM signal is strong. I suspect the chicken wire was convenient but probably not really a very good antenna, and while fussing over how to do the top I am thinking of putting a dipole wire antenna between the batting and top above the chicken wire. I don’t know if the proximity of the conductive chicken wire to the dipole would defeat the system.
Radio and electromagnetism is black art to me, anyone have better ideas?
Jim
The chicken wire is not a good idea for the FM band. AM is a different animal, and the longer the antenna, the better the reception. My grandfather was an electrician starting in 1918. He used to use the 1500 watt light bulbs as an AM antenna. He lived in Cincinnati, and could receive stations from up to 1000 miles away!
FM is known as the 4 meter band due to its wavelength. The optimum antenna length for radio receivers is one quarter of the wavelength. In the FM case this is one meter, or 39 inches. If you can hide an antenna 39 inches long from a newer car above the chicken wire, then run a quad shielded coaxial cable down to the FM receiver, it should help your reception quite a bit. Again, either soldered or crimped connections would be best.
Here is how the antenna was hidden in my Packard wheel well. Hard to notice when it is down
My 37 Cord phaeton has an antenna cleverly hidden….hanging under the car!
As to the chicken wire antenna, it would be a single wire for AM, correct? Not a coax cable….
Yes, the AM antenna wire would be a single unshielded wire.
Getting back to the issue of interference, That can come not only from the ignition, but also from the generator. Later cars had a condenser (capacitor) on the generator to help smooth out or eliminate harmonics (which shouldn’t exist in the direct current world). This would be caused by issues with the armature or brushes. You may also try a condenser on the battery terminal of the regulator. My ’62 TBird Roadster has one, as well as the early Mustangs with a generator, for radio suppression. I am not sure what size it is, but you could try a spare from the distributor (of any car!) and see if there is any improvement. These types of condensers are not polarized like electrolytics, so there should not be an issue with the positive ground.
Bob, my ’36 Packard originally had a radio and did (does) have a condenser mounted somewhere around the circuit breaker behind the dash – I imagine it doesn’t function anymore but didn’t know what to replace it with. Since I don’t listen to AM anyway I didn’t spend much time chasing it. It would be worth an experiment to put one across the regulator. I wonder if it would suppress the sparking of the brushes and improve brush life?
Sorry we have gotten a bit off track from the original question. My dome light is in very good condition with essentially no corrosion – except the tiny wire sockets do appear to have some surface corrosion and certainly could be a connection problem that could lead to overheating.
Bill, you will appreciate my problems with my Jaguar electrical a few years back. Despite the Lucas “Prince of Darkness” reputation, they all seemed to stem from slight corrosion on the fuse and connector surfaces.
Thanks for the help!
Jim