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Lighting Up the Post-98 Rear Center Reflector

Scorpion8

Hard-core CEG'er
Joined
Jul 10, 2008
Messages
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Juneau, AK
I searched around, and can't believe there isn't a thread on this. There is a thread on lighting up the center emblem for SVT's, but I think it could go farther. My interest is in adding lights to the rear trunk lid center reflector across the back of my 98, so that there is a solid bar of light. I don't think they need to light up with the brakes, just with the running lights. I scammed this photo off here somewhere, just for illustration purposes.

1998DetroitGrandPrixContourSVTPaceC.jpg


Is there any known legal issues (too much light?)

Would a string of LEDs set inside the reflector do the job, wired along the trunk lid supports and back down to the rear running lights? Has anybody tried this?
 
There are a couple...

I remember them talking about taking the neon light out of the 97/98 Mark VIII, but it's probly too wide. Then there's two of them in like 94+[ish] T-birds.

LEDs came up, just would need a lot of them to uniformly light it up.
 
There's lots of 12V LED rope light suppliers out there. I was thinking of opening that panel up and hot gluing a rope light around inside. Hmmmm....
 
IIRC the light panel from the Lincoln Mark VIIIs was deemed too expensive and the project was scrapped. It has been talked about but no one has done anything. I would be interested in seeing results from a project like this, I have often thought about doing this myself.
 
I think you will have a hard time making it look good.

Back when the Mercury Sable had a lighted grill bar, I saw some attempts to light the similar grill bar on the Tracer. Because it wasn't designed for it, the results were miserable.

If the reflector wasn't designed for lights, you may have a hard time getting the desired effect.

That said, if you do go ahead, please let us know the results.
 
yeah i posted a thread when i joined about doing 4 led's spaced evenly across and centered in the reflector. it was really hard to get everything even, and theres no room to put a led bar without cutting into it.

search for it im far to lazy to look up something that isnt worth all my time to do because its to hard. at least for me
 
I found two threads on this just in these forums....

yeah i posted a thread when i joined about

Probably used different search words than I did, which is easy to do "almost" the same search and get entirely different results. Still, I'd appreciate some links or directed marks to threads so I an see what others have tried. Thanks.
 
Maybe the lighting elements from the Lincoln Mark VIII's would work, the last years of its production had that "beam" that lit up back there, very cool and would look awesome on the Contour:cool:
 
i've been thinking about lighting mine up too. its very similar to the new Lincoln MKX. their whole light bar lights up, i think its definantly do-able with a few leds and i think it'd look pretty sweet.
 
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