We had about and hour and a half invested in our supper, but everyone walked out of El Mexicano satisfied, and ready to roll. Darren was the leader of the pack, followed closely by Dale and James in the Gremlin, with Rachael and Skippy giving chase in the Belvedere. I fired up the Valiant, backed out in front of Boone, turned on my lights, and...no headlights. I pushed and pulled the switch several times...nothing.

I circled back into the parking lot, and shut the car off. Robert was still there, as was Boone and Dad in the Barnyard Viper. After about fifteen minutes of messing around, then searching through the Valiant, I realized about 90% of my electrical tools and stuff were in the Belvedere, so I called Rachael, and told her to turn around and come back.

The good news was, once again, I had electrical expertise in the form of Robert and Aaron, on location. The bad news is, with guys like this, you don't just run a jumper wire and head on down the road. You have to test, diagnose the problem, and eliminate any weak or potential problem areas.
"Where's the fuse box?" Robert asked, with Aaron already probing around under the dash with a test light.
"Uh...I yanked that out and threw it away", I reluctantly explained.
I could see Aaron's hand with the test light in it recoil, almost involuntarily as Robert groaned, "So what kind of circuit protection do you have?"
"Well, I did the race car wiring first, then I ran a jumper wire from that over to the factory wiring, and stuff just started working, so I left well enough alone!"

Rachael pulled back in the parking lot, and the headlights on the Belvedere were two very dim orange orbs that couldn't have possibly been providing enough light to drive by!
I instructed her to leave it running, and opened the hood to find the plug dangling from the back of the alternator. Apparently, with all our attempts to get it working properly, someone had broken the clip feature which holds it in. I stuck it back in place, and the lights began to brighten considerably. The 440 sounded like garbage though, piston slap, rod knock, lifters?
"You here that Robert?" I asked in a hushed voice, as he was standing right beside me.
"Yeah, but I wasn't going to mention it...doesn't sound all that healthy!"
I shut the hood, and gave Rachael a thumbs up. Things always sound worse when you are tired and road weary, we would re-visit that problem in the morning!

We tested, and determined the switch was good, determined that the wiring from the firewall to the lights was good, determined that the wiring from the switch to the dimmer switch was good. Finally it was narrowed down to a short in the wiring from the dimmer switch to the firewall plug.

The two experts determined that I was lucky I didn't melt the whole mess together, or burn the car down. Since I already had a fused light circuit on my painless panel that was powering the gauge lights, they decided to tap into that relay, then jumper to the headlights.

A few minutes later we were rolling down I-57, and I commented to Aaron that the lights were much brighter than they had ever been in the past. He rolled his eyes, chuckled, and shook his head, but refused to comment.

We jumped off of I-57 fourteen miles later, but before we could cover the 1 and a half miles to US-45 North, we lost the headlights again, fortunately we were right at the entrance of a BP Station. We fueled all the vehicles, and my suggestion that we replace the blown fuse with a higher amperage rated fuse was shot down by the electrical Nazi's that I had unwittingly teamed with for this trip! The solution they came up with was to unplug the inside two headlights, and run on the outboards only.

Looking at the time stamps on these pictures of Darren and Dale at the same station, they had about an hour and twenty minute lead on us at that point.