"Third Eye" (Taillight)
"Third Eye" (Taillight)
I like the look of the illuminated "Pontiac" logo on the rear fascia of Sunfire Coupes, so I checked into how I might graft one onto my Vibe. Unfortunately, the hatch mechanism gets in the way, unless I wanted to drill about three dozen holes in the "Pontiac" letters above the rear plate and glue in L.E.D.s! The GrafxWerks overlay for the CHMSL (third brake light) would give a similar effect, but only with the brakes applied. My Plan A was to source a two-filament socket similar to the stock single one and tap into a wire for a tail light to provide illumination when they were on also. Looking at many cars and several catalogs I couldn't come up with a match, so: On to Plan B. I got two "mini bulb" sockets from Canadian Tire (Pep Boys of The North) fitted them with the lowest-wattage bulbs in their stock (194s) and positioned them in the cut outs on either side of the brake light socket. I grounded them with a sheet metal screw, fished a wire down the left rear pillar and spliced it into the appropriate wire. As proof of concept, I printed off a "Vibe" logo in the largest font in my MS Office program, ran it through a copyer/enlarger onto a transparency and taped it to the brake light lens: Perfect! (except that the lettering is a bit translucent; guess I''ll have to spring for the real thing from GrafxWerks)Anyway, it looks just as I'd envisioned. (Hope there don't turn out to be any laws against third tail lights, though...) If anyone's interested in details, I'll get some help re posting pix.