Installing the Rear Cargo Light
Installing the rear cargo light was the second item on my list today.
The first item on my to-do list was a family trip to Walmart. Yes, I typically buy my Jeep gear from eBay or Amazon since using these links helps pay for a small portion of my Jeep parts (I think I have made a grand total of $15 so far.)
So here is a shameless plug… Click this link to see how you can help (It’s Free).
Okay, so back to the task at hand…
I did not create a post for the trip to the store because the only photo I could have posted would have been a picture of my youngest daughter and me riding on one of the electric carts. Funny, I know!
Before you start laughing too hard, we did this because she is in a walking boot and I didn’t want to wear her out walking all over the store. My oldest daughter was very embarrassed, so she and my wife took a different cart and went their own way through the store. (She isn’t even a teenager yet — I am going to be in trouble!)
When we got home from the store, I got to work on the dome light is the rear cargo area.
In hindsight, it was a relatively simple task. For some reason, though, I seem to have a habit of making what should be simple tasks and turn them into harder jobs when it comes to working on the Jeep.
The first thing I did was get out all of the parts I have collected.
I ordered a replacement dome light, and it looked cheap when it arrived.
Then I ordered one off of eBay from a donor Jeep. When it arrived it was really dirty and required a lot fo clean up. Fortunately, under all of the dirt and grime was a usable dome light cover. (I needed one because mine was missing when I got the Jeep).
So here is what everything looked like:
This is the donor cargo light:
This is my original one. It was much cleaner, but this is only the base and not the lens.
Here is the nice new one (again the lens was all white and looked cheap).
You can see why I wanted to use the base from the new one. It was obviously much nicer looking than the two 30-year-old stock parts.
The major issue was that when you order one of these replacement dome lights online… IT DOES NOT COME WITH THE WIRING HARDWARE!!! Are you kidding me!
See in the photo above; there are no clips for the light bulb or the wiring. I was very mad.
This meant I had to clean and reuse the old parts.
Did I mention that I seem to find a way to make easy tasks much harder…
So, I pulled the old parts, cleaned them and rewired it so I would work using the new bracket.
Here is the new one beside the old one:
That’s all I have for talking about the dome lights.
At some point, I will probably order an LED replacement bulb, but I am over dealing with dome lights for now.