Now that I've got my Volvo for almost half a year now, and given it all of the extra care it needed, the time has come to do a more 'fun' project.
I work in events, so sometimes have to stop in awkard places. Also, I tend to stop when I see an accident happening or see people having car trouble. In such cases, extra visibility is a plus, so I started looking for a discrete way to install extra amber lighting in my '99 V70XC.
Two basic rules were applied:
1) The extra lights (and switches) shouldn't be too conspicuous when not in use
2) No harm should be done to the car, no drilling, no bolting, etc, should I ever want to remove the lights.
After some looking, I found this lightbar (not my video, but you get the idea) https://youtu.be/In4bWZctwds and ordered it on-line.
When it arrived, I started looking for a good place to mount it. My first idea was to mount it in the tailgate behind the rear window, but due to the wiper motor at the bottom and the brake light at the top of the window, it was not possible to mount the lightbar at either the top or bottom edge of the window.
Keeping in mind my wish to mount it in such a way that it shouldn't be too conspicuous when not in use, I decided to mount the lightbar to the luggage/pet rack.
Then for the wiring and switching part: After inspecting the switch-unit that was provided with the lightbar, I decided that I did not want to use this because of the way it looked (cheap) and started looking for a way to switch the lightbar from the dashboard.
The lightbar has two switches: one switch to switch it either on or of, and a tapping switch that allows you to choose different flash patterns.
When looking at switches I already had on my dash, I noticed that the front fog-switch is a continous one, while the rear-fog switch is a tapping switch. Exactly what I needed!
Went to the salvage yard and got myself these two switches for €25.
The front-fog switch is pretty straight forward, except that it was new to me that it switches the ground and not the positive. This led to confusion when hooking up the LED indicator inside the switch itself, but this topic cleared it up for me: http://volvoforums.com/forum/volvo-850- ... elp-41438/. I decided to switch the lightbar-ground directly without a relay (current drawn is less than 1 amp) and not to use the indicator light inside the switch itself (with the amber lights flashing in your rear-view mirror, you don't need the indicator light to tell whether they're on or off.)
The switches were modified to fit in the dash: apparently there is more depth on the left side of the steering wheel than there is on the right. I only found out after buying the switches, so decided to modify the tapping switch to make it fit.
The tapping switch normally includes a relay switching unit inside the housing which is toggled by pressing the switch. I didn't need toggling mode, but only a 'direct tap'-mode, so I got rid of the relay and soldered my wiring directly to the microswitch itself.
As for the wiring:
I was able to just remove the side trim along the rear and front doorsteps by gently pulling them. I had to lengthen the cable that was supplied with the lightbar and was able to nicely hide it under the carpet and trim.
I had the wiring come up at the dash and hooked up the two switches. For the switch backlighting, I spliced into the harness-plug that normally hooks up to the sunroof (which I don't have). For continuous power I used the accessory plug
Lightbar power is supplied from pin no. 1 (continuous 12v, also without keys in) and ground is supplied from pin no. 8 in the accessory plug. Luckily, I was able to pick up these pins at the dealer for free and put them in the counter-plug that was already present under my dash. I am sorry that I didn't take a picture of this, I just put the trim back in place when I realized this.
As you can see in the picture, the lightbar is nice and bright, but not so visible when not in use. When wanting to get it out of sight entirely, I can fold up the luggage rack.
Any questions from people wanting to do something similar, let me know!
Joost
