Doing a little work on the '87 right now to get it properly setup to haul a trailer, and one of those steps is to ensure trailer lighting is working correctly. I'm a fan of taking the lighting load off of the vehicle circuitry and passing it to a "standalone" system.
Now my car was not originally a outfitted trailer wiring car, so it lacks the four relays that were present on such models. Effectively there were four electromechanical relays present to run the left/right turn signals, running lights, and a battery charging circuit. The latter I'm unconcerned with as I dunno how comfortable I am with a 30 or 40 amp lead just running through the car like that to a 7 pin trailer socket. Regardless, I'm not sure what style relay was used at the time, but a standard Bosch cube style relay would work in this application if I opted to set things up similar to factory.
The other option is to use a modern trailer light module of solid state nature that takes the load off of the vehicle circuit. Just like the electromechanical setup, it takes the load from the vehicle circuitry.
Both of these setups use a dedicated power lead to power the system, so the input from the vehicle circuitry is just a signal to drive the output.
Given the choice of the OE style electromechanical setup or the aftermarket solid state setup, which would you opt to use in this scenario?
Now my car was not originally a outfitted trailer wiring car, so it lacks the four relays that were present on such models. Effectively there were four electromechanical relays present to run the left/right turn signals, running lights, and a battery charging circuit. The latter I'm unconcerned with as I dunno how comfortable I am with a 30 or 40 amp lead just running through the car like that to a 7 pin trailer socket. Regardless, I'm not sure what style relay was used at the time, but a standard Bosch cube style relay would work in this application if I opted to set things up similar to factory.
The other option is to use a modern trailer light module of solid state nature that takes the load off of the vehicle circuit. Just like the electromechanical setup, it takes the load from the vehicle circuitry.
Both of these setups use a dedicated power lead to power the system, so the input from the vehicle circuitry is just a signal to drive the output.
Given the choice of the OE style electromechanical setup or the aftermarket solid state setup, which would you opt to use in this scenario?
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