ZRE JDM Tail light globe switch

[dutchie101]

Hey'all. Ive copied this over from my original post in the corolla forum. Enjoy!

JDM Tail light switch guide

No "rice" comments this time please

This is an awesome JMD style tail light switch. Your parkers are now in the middle of the taillight, making the rear look tight and thin. Not that there is anything wrong with tight asses B)

Now typical JDM style is to make the rear look fatter, wider and more full... I am talking about the rear of the car still, trust me :) Your brake light is in the middle as standard. Not cool, not fat.

This guide swaps these two lights around, moving the parkers to the outside, widening the look of the rear, and moving the brakes to the center, making them shine brighter upon illumination also.

The finished swap will look like this. Sorry for the over exposed pics but you get the idea:

Now lets start.

1. TAIL LIGHT REMOVAL

Now, before you go cutting anything, i can tell you that the swap can be made without extending the wiring. You can stretch the wiring to reach, it will make it with some serious stretching, but puts a lot of strain on the wiring and associated sockets, not good. I opted for a simple extension of the parker wires, also make for easier globe replacement. This tech goes through the extension process.

First step is simple, remove the rear tail lights. All you need is a 10mm ring spanner or 10mm double ended spanner and a largish flathead screw driver and a pair of needle nose pliers if you like. OK,open the access panels found in the rear corners of the boot space.

You will see two protruding bolts, one near the bottom and one towards the top. Both with 10mm nuts on them, loosen and remove these, dont drop the nuts or you wont see them ever again :) Next, you will see two blue clip tabs. The bottom clip has tabs can be squeezed in to free up the clip, and the top one is a little harder. Use the screwdriver to squeeze the bottom tab of the top clip, and then postion the screwdriver above the clip to push down on the clip and 'squeeze the clip top free the light. You will see what i mean when you try it.

Unclip the loom plug and now you have your lights free. Yay!

This is the standard setup for the left tail light:

2. LIGHT SWAP AND EXTENSION

Ok, now undo both globes, and move the brake to the center hole. Good stuff. Easy.

Now get two wires for extending the parker, around 10cm is fine. You will need 4 wires all up, 2 for each side.

Neatly snip the parker wires in the middle, giving you plenty of room to move. Strip the wires back around 10-15mm.

Twist the corresponding wires together, the loom side first, solder and slip over 2 pieces of heat shrink per wire. Neatly solder the joins. Again twist the plug side wires together with the extension wires, solder and slip the heat shrink over both joins and heat with heat gun or lighter to shrink. repeat with the other wire.

Options other than solder

Just checked out the Narva range. I dont know how good these are, but its worth putting them up for those that can or don't solder their joints.

Narva cable joiners - item 56056BL i think

Narva solder splice - item 56382 should be good

Narva heatshrink terminals/joiners - item 56350 should be right

Some of these come in a pack of 50 or 25. Prob more than you need. Last option is to drop into you local auto electrician, they should do it for 20 bucks or so.

You should now have nice and neat extension of those parker wires. Simply slot that parker into the outer housing and your done.

Like this:

Tuck away those extended wires, replace the light, clip in, do those nuts up and away you go.

Repeat for the other side and you done!

PS: I changed the 5W T10 globes in the parkers to 8W T10 globes. I had these spare after changing my map globes for flux type 9x led T10's.

Hope this all made sense and enjoy your plump ZRE!!