Mak

My front turn signals only work as parking lights or turn signals... no running lights when the headlights are on. I'm just wondering if this is normal operation?

Jaybird

My '67 Delta 88 is the same. I'm sure we could re-wire them to make them turn on as running lights as well. I want to look at this in the future too!

Jaybird

stan 65 cutlass

Thats how they work
Only on park lite

jaunty75

I'm curious as to why. With the front turn signals sandwiched between the high- and low-beams, when the high beams are on, you can't see them, anyway. Even with just the low-beams on, the turn signal light is still mostly lost in the glare of the adjacent headlight.

What solution in search of a problem are we working on here?



P.S. My car is driven so little at night that I can't remember the last time I used the headlights because it was actually dark enough to need them. I turn them on once in a while just to make sure they work. Heck, it's a collector car driven on sunny days with the top down!


Added later: I missed the running light reference. In Canada, cars are required by law to have daytime running lights, correct? I assume, though, that cars that didn't originally come with them are grandfathered and thus don't need to have them added?

I imagine wiring up the turn signal lights to function this way would be an interesting challenge. You could, of course, just run a wire directly from the a switched circuit on the fuse box directly to the lights themselves. Then they would go on whenever the ignition is ON. But they would not flash when used as turn signals. To fix that would complicate things, perhaps considerably.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it isn't it true that most cars with daytime running lights have a separate light for this? In other words, the turn signal light is in a different pod on the front end of the car, perhaps right next to the daytime light. Maybe not. I had an '00 Chevy Tahoe once, and it had daytime running lights. But as I recall they were separate from the turn signal lights.

Here's an '00 Tahoe. The running lights are illuminated and are on the inboard end of the lower bank of lights on each side. The turn signal lights are on the outboard end of that lower pod of lights. The issue of having the turn signal lights and the daytime running lights be the same lights never arises.

rustyroger

I noticed the same thing on '59 Cadillacs, and I dare say many other cars of similar vintage also do this.
I suspect it may be because the limited capacity dynamo generators of the time were not up to running too many services at one time. 40 amps was about their maximum output, you might need that amount just to power the sound system on some cars today.
Roger.

jaunty75

Good point! I hadn't thought of this.

TripDeuces

I went through this same thing when I replaced my headlight switch. Read through my thread and near the bottom it tells how to make them work both ways.

https://classicoldsmobile.com/forums...ing-lamps.html

Thanks to Lady72nRob71 for the fix on that

Mak

I'm not interested in changing them... just wanted to confirm it was normal operation. Thanks for the info!