Dash Lights

The dash lights on my wife's 70 satellite will not turn off unless I unhook the battery cable. Has anyone else had this problem? Any ideas? Thanks.

headlight switch

Agreed. Head down to Napa or any local auto parts store in the area and pickup a new one. Aftermarket ones don't cost much.

Thanks!

Help! I pulled the headlight switch and the dash light dimmer switch, and the dash lights are still on. Any ideas?

I just pulled the fuse, lights stay on. The radio and the heater control panel are also lit.

when did it start doing this and have you done any electrical work to it before this happened? Sounds like a feed back from something in the gauges.

Ok. Now it's a hard one. Most likely you have a wire shorting out through the light circuit. It's drawing current through the lights (lighting the filaments) and returning the current to ground. The lights are acting as a fuse sort of, but not drawing so much current as to burn up wiring.

Look for pinched wires or cracked insulation. I'd start under the hood. There is only one harness that has lighting there. Next, check in trunk. You can unplug each of those two harnesses and check for grounds. Last, and more involved, will be checking under dash. Look for wires I areas that things move (clutch, brake pedal, e-brake, ash tray).

Good luck.

One other quick check is to pull the courtesy dome light fuse.It shares some of the headlight dash light circuitry.

The "inst" fuse only gets power when headlight switch is turned on. I bet somebody's been messing with that under dash/instrument panel wiring, possibly the orange wires. Stumpy has good point, when did this issue surface?

Sorry for the brainfart. On rereading my post I thought that can't be right so I dug up the wiring diagrams and confirmed that I could not have been more wrong. Sorry again, I should have looked it up first.

It still sounds like something might have been inadvertantly connected to the instrument light circuit and is back feeding it.

This problem started shortly after we bought it. I was working too much to mess with it. She would disconnect the battery after driving. I did add an aftermarket air conditioning system. I cannot remember if this started before or after the a/c. The car sat for a year and a half while I swapped in a stroker 5.7 hemi. I just fired it up over the 3 day weekend for the first time. I had forgotten about the dash light problem until the battery went dead over night. I will check all of the new a/c wires too. This car does not seem to have been messed with much by previous owners. I did not see any hacking of wires under the dash.

I went out and took the gauge cluster out. the radio light stayed on. I unhooked the radio and the the heater control light stays on. I wish I would have tackled this problem before adding the efi, as the extra wiring from it makes it harder to see under the dash. My eyes are not the greatest either.

Should the orange wires have power all the time? Mine do.

Orange - power with ignition or accessory ON
Pink - On all the time

Yep I had a brain fart on the orange wires. Sorry

Did you wire your AC to the fuse box off of something that is always hot?

I found it! The orange wire going into the back of the fuse box had rubbed against another hot terminal bared the wire and fed it power.

Great. That is the kind of thing that can drive you crazy.

I would like to thank everyone who put me on the right track of looking at the orange wires.