okay... i've been trying to get help with this for a long time, and maybe now somebody will finally have an answer for me. maybe shoebox can chime in here, you always know something

when i have my lights turned off, my brake lights work fine. once i turn my lights on... both the bulbs that are supposed to get brighter when i hit my brakes go out on the driver's side... and one lights up and one goes out on the passenger side. when i turn on my blinker... on the driver's side, the light goes out, then comes back on, etc giving it the illusion that it actually works. on the passenger side... one goes out, and ones gets brighter... like a blinking christmas light effect...

at any rate, i have no idea what it is. i'm sure that it's not the flasher, it's not the bulbs... i've heard people say "maybe it's the sockets"... but from the way it looks, it's not that simple. maybe there's another solution here that i'm not finding? anybody got any input here?

- jay

I have a 94 Firebird and had the same problems and replaced the tail light wiring harness off a 97 model. The sockets were to blame they had built up corrosion and caused high resitance, made tailights do all kinds of funky stuff. the harness is a plug in deal.

I would look at the sockets and make sure there is no corrosion. Clean them and the bulbs up and put new bulb grease on them. Also check anywhere the harness is grounded at the rear of the car.

I'm going to have to go with sockets too, as when I first bought my black car it had your same problem. Replacing the sockets fixed it all.

FYI, DON"T get them from a dealer. They're like $50 a piece. You can get pretty much the same low profile sockets at Pep Boys or the like for about 3-5 a piece.

yeah replace the rear harness, i got mine from e bay for 25 bucks off a ls1 car. the ls1s have brighter bulbs, better designed sockets. also like shoebox said the rear ground causes problems too.

sockets

what's the rear harness you guys are talking about? i know what the sockets are... and if i could get this problem fixed and at the same time make my taillights a little brighter, that'd be great since i keep getting harassed about how dim my taillights are cuz of my blackouts...

- jay

heres a firebird ls1 harness

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eB...tem=2441290988

thats what it looks like and you just unplug your old one and plug in this one. takes about 20 minutes to do and the LS1s have different sockets for which you can use brighter bulbs. mine came with sylvanias.

What you do is remove all the tailights and then section between the tailights and it plugs in on the left hand side. I cleaned all my sockets checked for resistance and even tried given them all new grounds nothing worked. I think sockets should do the trick but would rather have a sealed harness. How do the sockets get wired??? do they have a pigtail or can you solder directly to the trminals???

I just had to replace the sockets on mine. No need to do the entire harness. They can be bought at any GM parts store.

and yea i had the same problem with my lights

ok i just replaced mine, and the ground wire was bad, and the owner before me rigged up some stupid thing where he added his own ground wire... but we played around w/ the light bulb to figure out what that wire did, it was just a ground but it was exactly like u say... so check ur ground wire, cause i guess it was bad on mine...

ohh well thats my advice i had similar problems, when the lights were on it was the break light, and when i hit the breaks it was out, ... stuff like that

wow... if i was to buy that wiring harness, how hard would it be to install? that looks like a lot of wiring to me...

- jay

its plug and play, very simple. 20 minutes to do mine

awesome. i'll have to invest in one if i can find another one when i have a little more cash... did the ls1 harness make your taillights any brighter?

- jay

yes significantly brighter. mine came with sylvania bulbs so that may make a difference, but the socket design is much better so that too may make a difference. overall get the ls1 harness and sylvania bulbs from walmart.