Armed with a new headlight and dimmer switch I tackled my lack of headlights. Not only do I want to replace the broken switches but I also learned that a headlight relay mod in these old trucks is very helpful. So again I turned the forum and found about a dozen posts about doing the relay upgrade and it looked fairly simple. By using a relay to pull power straight from the battery you’re able to run brighter lamps and don’t need to worry about the headlight switch burning out.
With a quick test to confirm that the new switches fixed my problem I moved on to adding the relays. I mounted them next to my Horn Relay and pulled the constant 12v power from there and then ran the ground wires all the way to the frame. Cutting my brand new wiring harness was a little nerve wracking, but it had to be done. Leaving as much wire as possible before the stock plug into the radiator support I maintained the correct color coding for headlight wires.
A little snipping, stripping, soldering, crimping and heat shrinking and boom! I had working relays, for my low beams only… So I started checking all the leads and all my connections. Nothing was wrong. Why wasn’t I getting power to the high beams?! Finally I checked the main terminal in the fire wall and realized the high beam blade in the plug had be bent and wasn’t seating into it’s respectful location. Success!
A bonus of replacing the headlight switch was that I got my dash lights back too! Even the high beam indicator works, which is a tiny little Chevy bowtie that lights up red, super cool. Lastly I installed a new dome light and license plate light. All lights are now working, except the front passenger blinker which has a bad socket.
Since I have a pretty much complete working dash cluster now, I decided it needed to be pulled out and painted. The water temp gauge doesn’t have a disconnect on the sender wire, so I had to pull the sender unit from the head and thread the whole thing back through the cab to get the cluster out. I disassembled the cluster and the gauges. There is a clear plexiglass piece with all the lettering and speedo numbers painted on the back. I cleaned that really well and got rid of a bunch of fogginess. Next is a thin stamped aluminum sheet that was black on the front and light green on the back. This serves to reflect the light and make the original gauges glow, so I painted that and rest of the cluster housing white to reflect better. The front of the dash plate got sprayed red to match the exterior accents. Using pinstripe tape I masked off the speedometer face and needle and hit that with satin black to match the exterior trim. Honestly it turned out a lot better than I thought.
Other work done was replacing the valve cover gaskets to stop the oil leaks, drained the extra fluid from the transmission to stop it from leaking, and added 1/4” spacers to the front wheels to stop the rims from scraping the control arms when turned all the way.
Im having a blast driving her every couple days.