Here you go, Rober-Nash did your idea while ago:

http://www.the370z.com/members/rober...74-switch.jpeg

Thanks for the heads up and work you have put in. Any DIY's like this save those of us not brave enough to do them first a lot of head aches.

Thanks so much for the detailed guide, a lot of it didn't make sense until I was under the car doing the install, but it came out great! I made it an additional brake light and think it just looks amazing. And the one I got isn't brighter than the rest of the brake lights, something I was worried about.

I got mine from Z Car Parts.com -- Motorsport Auto -- Home

Here's a quick vid I grabbed with my phone.


And a pic:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2590/...fb2848ec_b.jpg

Where did you get yours? Mine is the same brightness as the rest of my brake lights.

everyone is welcome hahah :happydance:

Can someone explain to me where to find the green wire for the brake light and the orange for the fog. I have the back panel off and took the tape off the main wire bundle. I see two orange wires (same color) and one green wire but I am not getting a current reading off the green with the brake light on. Don't know if I am at the right place. Also do I need to find a ground for the fog light if I have the oem harness hooked into it? Hope this makes sense. Thanks.

theres 5 wires in a bundle from my last diy..

http://www.the370z.com/exterior-inte...installed.html

its red - source
dark green - brakes
lightish tinge green/white - not sure
orange - fog
black - ground

i was doing the mod myself a while back, when i was testing each wire, i found out when i wired the dark green for brakes, the way you wire is that it
the 3rd parking brake will find that circuit first, therefore when you turn on your parking lights, you might notice your 3rd break light on (as opposed to pushing the brake to see the light)
you can fix this buy purchasing an extra relay, i know simota did this and some others but i was too lazy and impatient to buy the part lol...

but those who wired the dark green was a problem for many fog light installers... (4 lights on for no reason)

you can tap the red wire and ground the black. just splice the fog lamp and save the connector.

thats what i did and it now functions as a backup light whenever i switch the stalk to parking lights or headlights to ON.

whats even better as a bonus, when i press the brake you can see the 3rd light turn on as well as the fog light turn brighter as well.

^_^ hope that helps.

Jookiyaya,

Thanks for your help but I am still confused. The five wire harness you talk about - is that the harness that goes to the back lights (have to remove one of the back side panels to get to it) or is it located somewhere else? Also, someone mentioned the wires that come out of the hole with the gromet as being those from the fog light. The way you have it connected will turn the fog light on when in reverse and act as a brake light?

the harness that connects your tail lamps yes. if you slice the plastic protector you can see the wire bundles.

im not sure about the grommet hole, but the connector harness from the oem fog light does connect where it should be, it's just we usdm Z's dont have the stalk on the steering wheel column to turn it on.

as far as the fog light in reverse , thats a relay thing. ive never seen a rear fog light turn on when you are in reverse as oem, although it makes since, the bright white lights and the extra red in fog situations.....

I have my fog light tapped into the orange wire from the tail light harness so it turns on in reverse. I'm still working on hooking up the relay and flasher so it will flash while in revers...and will do a switch to manually turn it off and on at night. I have pics on page 5 showing which wires from the foglight harness before the grommet in the firewall to tap into. Your reference to your last sentence(s)...yes that is coming from the foglight harness. So instead of cutting off the foglight connector and wasting that clean connection, I tapped into the wiring further up before that grommet. If you want both reverse and brake, it needs to tap into the orange and dar green wire from tail lamp...don't know if you need a relay for this, didn't try this configuration.

Thanks for your help. I found the orange and black wires from the fog light and decided to put in a switch to control the light instead.

This should be a good project can not wait to do it for a buddy of mine.

I just finished wiring up the relay to get the flasher to work. I will post up some pics and wiring diagrams for the relay.

nice bro

OK, so wiring it this way is for the foglight to only come on (and flash) while in reverse.

If your Z has the wiring harness plug for the fog light, you can utilize that plug and tap into the wiring further up in the hatch. Locate the firewall grommet that would be somewhat directly behind the hatch light. Since there is no power to the wiring harness, you'll need to tap into the larger black(-) and orange(+) wires in the wiring bundle here. Pick a tail lamp to tap into; the grounding point for all the wires back here is on the drivers side. (There is a post further up showing the wiring scheme for the wires to/from the tail lamp.) In this case only, you only need to tap into the orange (reverse light) wire. NOTE: You may notice in my pics that I've spliced and repaired the red wire. This is only because I was doing some testing with the tail lamp and whether I wanted the fog light always on with the tail lamps. I've decided against it for now, and will wire up a manual switch at a later date.

So now to the wiring harness and flasher. Wire up accordingly:
85 - wire together w/30 to orange wire of tail lamp.
86 - Ground; send wire to the grounding point.
87a - need to wire to positive of fog lamp (the orange wire 1st mentioned in the 1st few pics); also needs to wire up to X of flasher.
87 - wire to L of flasher
30 - wire together w/85 to orange wire of tail lamp.

Flasher
X - need to wire to positive of fog lamp (the orange wire 1st mentioned in the 1st few pics); also needs to wire up to 87a of relay.
L - wire to 87 of relay

Fog Light Tapped Wires
Large Orange Wire - wire to X of flasher and 87a of relay
Large Black Wire - Wire to grounding point

Thanks for the writeup, I installed my fog light pretty easily yesterday. I didn't understand what you guys were talking about with the Loctite, but after attempting to unscrew the original fog light, I immediately understood what you guys were talking about. I ended up using an electric drill to unscrew the bolt, which melted the plastic, freeing the screw.

I was thinking of maybe adding a microcontroller later to do some pulse width modulation or blinking. I think if I come up with a cool idea, I'll build my own PCB and start the software process :)

By the way, is there any reason you guys are using Relays (moving parts, has a limited life) to control the blinking of the light? Why not use a transistor?

For those of you wondering about the wiring I posted a DIY specifically for it. It's set up to have a full off switch killing all light, a full on switch to manually light the fog, and a second on position to allow solid light with brakes and blinking with reverse.

http://www.the370z.com/diy-section-d...tml#post380682

Simota1, hope you don't mind me branching this off as my DIY is specifically for a certain wiring type and I didn't want to clutter the thread.

:tup: dont worry about it bro!!! i dont mind at all

Mr Z. I'm interested in adding the fog as a 4th brake light. So after installing the housing all I should have to do is run wire from the socket to one of the tail lights and tie into the Green and Black wires correct?

Also do you think it would be possible to use a InvisiCord (Invisicord Products Home Page) or something similar to tap into the OEM socket rather than slice the wires? I'd rather not cut/splice the wiring harness if nesseary.

Thanks for the great info, once the snow clears and it gets a bit warmer I'm hopeing to get this done along with the lighted sill plates.

Hi yubman!

I hope I understand you correctly…
It is necessary (no choice) to splice into the green cable (for braking) but I wouldn’t slice the black cable of the light assembly for the ground… Just ground it to the chassis directly and not into the tail light. As I mentioned above when you open the inside panel (It’s needed to remove the tail light assembly) you will find a nice ground bolt there (it has many other ground connection to it) and you should use this one. But since it’s inside the truck, you will have to go thought a rubber grommet. Otherwise, there are so many other ways to find a ground… (Licence plate, tail light, direct chassis) My choice of not using the tail light ground is that I didn’t feel comfortable completely using the LED circuit because the fog light uses a regular bulb that draws more current. Besides, I also had wire a special flashing module so it was better for me to do all this from inside the trunk.

As for the InvisiCord setup. Maybe it could work… but it’s really no big deal to tap into the OEM cables. There are even some clamps especially for that (you can find them anywhere) and they won’t even cut your original cable in two… it will just make an opening to access the metal wires and create a bridge for your connection... Takes about 2 sec.

Thanks Mr Z for the clairification, good point about the ground and power draw of the fog light. I should probabbly convert the bulb to LED which should also last longer and draw less power.

I think I know what kind of cable taps your refereing to, I'll stop by and pick some up from home depot once the weather breaks and hopefully get the fog installed.

Thanks again for the info.

Be careful with the LED setup! I have tried 5 different LED and none gave me a good result (after spending over 100$!!)

- One didn’t even fit in the socket hole!
- 2 other one did not give me nice results when it comes to inside illumination… Remember that the bulb hole is not centered… So it was designed for a single source of light… in the center. Not 12 different LED’s!
- Since I have a special socket with dual wire (normal and braking condition), the other LED’s I tried did not behave as they should when I stepped on the brakes… (To be honest I still don’t understand why but must have something to do with the inside wiring…:confused:)

In the end, I just gave up and kept the regular bulb!! :shakes head: Also FYI, I confirm that a regular bulb wired in one of the tail lights, does not dim the tail light compared to the other.

Mr_Z,

I joined this site just so I could ask you a few questions so I'm new to this forum business, haha. I had this same idea to do with my 370Z with the flashing and everything so I looked for how to do it and found this forum (yesss) so I want to do mine just like yours.

Ok so you must have bought the "Blinking Smart Stop Third Brake Light Module W/Delay" from flashingbrakelights.com like you said correct? Now, I'm no electrician, so I'm gonna have my bro-in-law help me with the install, but I want to try and understand what's going on... So you take that flashing module and tap it to the tail lights before that connection makes it to the new third tail/brake light. Seems like I'd have to tap the module to the brake lights and run it to one filament of the 7443 and then tap the tail lights to the other filament of the 7443, or is it just one wire to worry about? What I'm asking is... is the 7443 smart enough to do the tail light and brake light flashing with it's double filament as long as I have the flashing module and tap into JUST the tail light as you explain?

I just wanna do it right the first time so forgive me for the ignorance in my electrical understanding, haha... I'm actually not doing so hot in my electrical class right now as a matter of fact. Anyways, any help and tips would be appreciated, thanks for all the info. thus far.

Here... Hope this helps! ;)

BTW, my flashing unit was faulty which explained some trouble I had. The new one works as it should.

http://www.the370z.com/members/mr_z-...2-3rdbrake.jpg

great illustration mr z rep added for being so helpful :tup:

Wow wow wow. Very big help... I'm ordering the flashing module right now and then hopefully doin the install sometime next week. Thanks very much.

Hey Mr_Z, all the stuff I need is here and waiting to be installed (the 7443, flashing module, and the euro fog light itself). One question, is there a way to explain how exactly you modified that little socket to support the double filament bulb? It seems like a lot of work but if there's some trick you did I'd like to hear it, otherwise I'm ready and willing to dig in a make it happen, haha. Thanks.

I have a question...I looked under my car and saw that there is a grey plug right next to where the fog lamp would go. Does anyone know why that plug is there? Did they put it there for 2010 so it wouldnt be a pain in the *** to install a rear fog?

http://i49.tinypic.com/14uajrb.jpg

wow dood i have no idea i wonder where that wire goes... mine had a dummy plug only :shakes head:

I would really like to find out what that is for! I have the 2010 model too and I am going to install the lamp soon!

It ends up behind the passenger side kick I cut the wire then added a power source switched to the orange wire added a switch under my dash and the fog works perfect.

Ahhhh . . . you 2010 boys have life good. Back in my day we had to run custom wiring from the back ourselves. LOL.

Forgot to add this earlier but here is the technique I used to get the nut off without destroying it. Before you even start to loosen the nut just take your Dremel and cut a slot in the bolt. Then shove a flathead through a ratcheting wrench to hold the bolt while you ratchet off the nut. This method allows you to re-use both the nut and bolt if needed.

http://www.the370z.com/members/cbric...nk-removal.jpg

thats super smart and koool :happydance: :tup: good job bro

Nice :tup: rep to you

my 09 had that prewire ;)

So what does that mean for us who have the 2010 model? I apologize if I am being dense...

If you have the pre-wire, we just have to connect our ground, switches, relays, flashers, etc to the pre-wire? We don't have to gain access to the wiring on the taillights?

That only runs to the wiring up front which is set up to use the euro stalk. It won't hope you utilize the light for braking or reversing.

Hey guys, I just got my fog light in today and plan on doing the install on Saturday. I read the original DIY and wasnt too intimidated till I went through this entire thread which made my head start to spin. I attached some pictures to give you an idea of how the fog came to my house. I dont have any experience with electical work, though my father does, I would prefer to put this together with just my friend. If its simpler Ill just wire it so that the fog is on when my lights are on. It would be cool to have the flashing in reverse as well but I dont know where to go to get a flasher and five wire relay?

I posted a thread a few posts back that I made that enabled flashing and turn on with brakes and all that good stuff.