OK. Not too bad. I don't think you need to remove the headliner because the overhead lights remain "normal" operation.

All of the lights are parallel so the idea would be to find a convenient place to cut the branches of the circuits that lead to the other lights. Then you connect them all together and wire to the switch.

Let me look at some diagrams to locate the splices in the whole circuit.

I figured that I could just cut the common wire of all the lights to the dimmer and run new wires to the ones i wanted to work with it.
I was planning to replace the headliner anyway

Are you still interested in doing this?

I printed out some wire diagrams to see how much of a nightmare it would be. I need to look in my car tomorrow to see if I can find a couple of connectors that act as busses for all of the lights. Allededly, this is where they live:

Connector C312: Center Of LH Front Door Sill
Connector C313: Front Of LH Front Door Sill
Connector C314: Rear Of RH Front Door Sill
Connector C316: Center Of RH Front Door Sill

It appears that every dome and courtesy light bulb'* switched ground go these connectors. It would then be a matter of disconnecting them one by one. If the light that turns off is one that you want to wire to another switch, then leave it disconnected. If not, then reinsert it in the connector.

It'* too dark now but I'll check it out tomorrow

Ready? I don't think this will be a hard job, but it will be time consuming. The connector locations were as described (at least C313 was. I didn't take the passenger'* side apart...lazy).



The only 2 connectors you will need to find are C313 & C314. Both of he footwell lights are connected directly to the dimmer switch. For ease of the project, you may want to leave those alone. They will have the same operation as the dome (overhead) lights. They still can be changed though.

My suggestion would be to find these connectors at a junk yard or another member with a parts car. The wires can be disconnected and simply inserted into the "new" connector. Then you just need to wire the switch to the new connectors (you'll need two) . This will help if you ever want to go back to the factory setup and the connectors work quite well.

You probably should have a wiring diagram so you're not flying blind. I can help you out with that as well. Just request a PM for the diagrams if you don't already have them.

Good luck and keep us posted on the progress.

Ok I tried something. I spent the last couple hours taking apart the wiring on my parts car. I basically tried to rewire the dimmer switch and domelights. Heres a step by step
(sorry I didnt take pics:()
there are 4 wires on the back of the dimmer switch, and 3 wires on the domelight.

1. Disconnect the WHITE wire from the dimmer
2. Hook the WHITE wire through a seperate switch to GROUND
3. Disconnect the WHITE wire from the domelight.
4. Run a seperate wire from the WHITE on the domelight, to the WHITE terminal on the
dimmer.
5. Unplug the rear dome bulb that goes on with (doors, dash light, dimmer)

This results in

1. Clicking the dimmer switch ON activates the front domelights only (the individual
buttons sttill work as usual)
2. When you turn on the seperate switch, the under-dash lights and the lights in the
doors come on
3. BUT when you OPEN the doors, all of the lights come on EXCEPT the domelights,
which sucks, but you can still turn them on manually with the buttons or the dimmer.

And thats where I stand right now. this would be perfect for me except that I want the domelights to come on when you open the door.

Any suggestions are appreciated, and I didn't want to open up the door sils right now. Because I gota take them off soon anyway.

Hey randman1 do you have more pics of your 90?

That'* why I would have attacked it in a different way. Since you wanted the domelights to function exactly like they are supposed to do, I wouldn't have done anything with the dimmer switch or domelights.

Are these the ones on the C pillar adjacent to the rear window? Do these come on when you open the doors too?

This is correct operation for how you have rewired the circuit. The dimmer is one of 6 different ways to turn the dome light circuit on. 4 door pin switches, dimmer switch and illuminated entry timer (if equiped). You isolated the domelight from this circuit when you cut the white wire at the domelight and ran it to the dimmer switch, Now the domelight will only work with the dimmer. Almost sounds backwards from the way you wanted it.

In a way it is kinda backwards. I wanted to isolate the door lights, but I isolated the dome lights instead. This was just something that i tried in the parts car I have for experiments. Its all back the way it should be now. Next I will try the wiring under the floor panels. But its getting dark now. I can use the connectors in my donor car when I alter the wiring in my SSE. I can basically just disconnect the door lights from the system and wire them up seperately? I plan to get neons under my dash in the long run so the lights under the dash aren't a big deal.

Yep. Grab those connectors out of the other car. The wires in the connector (on the good car) can be easily disconnected with the aid of a jewlers screwdriver. Once disconnected, you can just plug them into the connector from the parts car.

When you remove the two connectors from the parts car, cut a short length of wire (3" to 4") from the harness. There will probably be a couple slightly larger gauge than the others (see pic above). Grab one of those... as a matter of fact, grab three. This will be used to connect to the switch you're adding and to each other.

So I took apart the wiring on my parts car and this is what I found:

on the drivers side, the connecter # is 14 PED, its near the front and is the only connector with all WHITE wires going to it. The wires that give power to the door lights are:

A B C D E F G

B goes to REAR doorlight
F goes to FRONT doorlight

and on the passenger side the connecter # is 9 PED it is also the only connector on the passenger side near the back that has only WHITE wires going to it.

A B C D E F G H I K

D goes to FRONTdoor light
E goes to REAR door light

This is from an 89 SE so the numbers may be different, and I will probably have to do this all over when I take my 90 apart.

Good call on the connector locations though, I figured I would have to take out the whole interior to find these. All that is left to do is connect these all to a swich to power. Only took me about 30 min to find these too.