reverse lights

[rubican!]

trying tog et my brothers CJ on the road and we have gotten to the point with the reverse lights where im wondering if we hard wire them up to a switch you manually press when in reverse will that pass inspection?

Maybe a stupid question but man it would be nice if it was true

[WilliamAWebb]

don't think so. My front lights on the bumper are wired to a switch and it didn't pass inspection like that. I had to take them off to get the sticker then I wired them back up. I would think it would be stricter for the reverse lights.

But I could be completely wrong

[YJeXtreme]

Remove the backup lights entirely, no problem then i dont have them in my jeep. or if you want to keep them on give me a call ive wired several abtique cars & can get them working right for you.

[cootees]

I knew someone that wired the reverse lights to a swith so that the car would pass inspection. Well it worked for them but that was several years ago.

[xjtrailrider]

Being a former SI I'm almost 100% sure that you can have auxiliary lights facing backwards as back-up lights as long as they only come on while the vehicle is in reverse. I always wire my back up lights like this;

Power from the battery to the rear of the vehicle and to a 30amp relay, this will be the power in.

Run a jumper from the back up lights on the vehicle to the switched side of the relay.

Ground the relay somewhere at the rear of the vehicle.

Then run the power out to the lights.

If you wanted to switch the lights on manually then I would need to figure that one out on paper but I think you would only need to break the jumper from the factory back-up lights and install a DPDT toggle in the cab, run wires to the switch from the back-up lights and back to the relay and pull some battery power from a source. Then you could have it either flipped one way for back-up lights or the other way for auxiliary lights.

All forward facing auxiliary lighting needs to be on ONLY when the low beams are on (only 2 auxiliary lights are allowed to be lit) or they have to be disconnected and are considered "ornaments"