Mk3 Cavalier Owners Club | Vauxhall Cavalier Dot Com

Ok so had a bit of a brainwave, and thought would this work.... It did!

Have a rock crawler with a customized body shell with lights that I've fitted myself, but to turn them on/off I had to remove the bodyshell and feck around with connections underneath.

So... loads of spare switches laying around, why not rig one up. It worked, I was surprised, thinking a switch needed more connections rather than just 2 wires as there are like 5 pins on it. Anyway, end result is an easy light switch on the truck.





















Ended up screwing myself up with superglue while fitting the switch, the switch button glued itself to the switch body, after a lot of cursing and fiddling, managed to get the button off and swap it for another one, along with the tiny springs in there, it works now.

Time for a beer and a smoke..

Yep good simple stuff.
For some reason 3 pins are for the tell-tale bulbs and illumination ground.

Nice little project.

Enjoy the beer n smoke

Ye, I was messing around with all the pins to see if I could get the switch light to light up but was not successful. Maybe it needs 12v to work where as I'm running the lights off a 9v battery. Will experiment with it.

Thanks Robsey.

Try replacing the bulb with an led.
They only run at between 2 and 3 volts, so just bung a small resistor in series and fanny will be your aunt.


I have done something like this with my bluetooth and alarm leds set into two of the heater panel switches.
Mine are running at about 3 volts each, set by my Nokia bluetooth and Meta alarm units.

I've managed to fit another rear fog switch in my room rigged up to several blue LED floodlights, and because the power source is 12V from drill batteries, the switch light comes on as it would do in the car. I've also found the bottom pin illuminates the rear fog symbol on the switch, if that's what you mean by tell tale light, but haven't rigged that up, just the on/off light.

Off:



On:



What I would love to achieve is to do the same to the other dash switches, as I have a light switch console with switches and the heater control console, I would like to wire up the switches to different lights and fit the consoles in my room, so when I press a button, a certain set of lights come on/off. Now the only trouble I have is working out which pin does what on the back of the switches themselves. I may be asking more questions here with regard to that.

The "tell tale" is the yellow bar across the top of the switch.
Just as in your bottom picture.

Ok thanks. I'm totally happy with that. So 12V is what I need to make it work, I got that.

As I said above, all I need to know is which pin is live, earth and illumination on the back of the switches, i.e the rear de-mister, the headlamp adjustment, and the headlamp switch, as that has loads of pins on the back of it.

The main switches are as follows: -



The headlamp beam height switch is an odd one, as it is a feed, illumination and then outputs with various resistances.

And the lighting switch also contains the dimming variable resistor and has an ignition live for illumination.

Thanks Robsey, although I can't zoom in and get a larger image as I have to log in to some website.

For all the square switches, illumination +12 volts is pin 4

Illumination ground (0 volts) is pin 1

For rear demister...

Pin 3 is 12 volt supply
Pin 2 is supply out to load
Pin 4 is also the supply to the tell tale
Pin 5 is the ground for the tell tale

The pins are in the order...


5 4
3
2 1

If your eyes are good you will see the numbers on the underside of the switch body next to the pins.

Great, thanks mate.

See updated post

That's what confused me, the small numbers. I can see them clearly, just didn't know what they meant