Upgrading My 1972 LSA Swap Monte Carlo To LED Tail Lights! (Bought The Kit 6 Yrs Ago..Never Opened)

the video you're about to watch here is three months old it is something that we filmed and kind of forgot about until yesterday or i guess today when i filmed the project car update video where we went through we talked about everything i mentioned some led tail lights on the monte carlo and said i made a video about it and never posted it and you guys said you want to see it in the comments so boom here it is keep in mind it's old footage the shop is old nothing is current things aren't current so just remember that before you make a comment about why some doesn't make sense relative to now where are you gonna put the ugliest self-tapper deck screw that's what really matters on a classic muscle car like this one so we got a little bit of a barn find of sorts today not a car parts you ever got something in the mail for your car and you just never opened the box and six years later you're not even really sure what's in the box i have this right here this has been sealed for six years since 2014. i'm pretty sure it's led taillights for the monte carlo but it was always so messed up that i never bothered to open it and put it in so they just sat on a shelf and when i brought the monte carlo down in pennsylvania i grabbed this figured i'd throw them in we're about to open this thing that feels like i'm looking at a time capsule here me first dime okay let's open this thing up just so you know i'm not bs in you right here look at that it says august 7 2014 that's when this was shipped let's open it up so what happened was i got some led tail lights for the monte carlo it was one of the first things i ever did to it when i got that car in april of 2014. well even my friend austin wired him up in his driveway i don't even know if they were like wired correctly i think we just twisted the wires around and put some tape over it we'll wash the car at some point and they shorted out and i told these guys that and they just sent me a replacement set but that car was always so broken there was always something wrong with it that i was trying to fix just to drive it so like i wasn't concerned with putting my led tail lights back in because i just put the regular bulbs back in there yeah i speak highly of trim parts for that i don't even know if this is still a business that was six and a half years ago they sent me this box i'm a little nostalgic because i know that i didn't even know how to work on cars when i got this box in the mail and i'm about to open it six and a half years later and i should rephrase my friend austin wired the taillights in his driveway because i didn't know how to that's how long ago this was i didn't even know this was like beyond me i had to go have him help me just open it next to all this valued inventory here i'm really hoping we can put these in today but that's kind of banking on this box actually containing the components that i think it does and them not being broken i don't know sounds like they're either packing peanuts in there or something broken into multiple pieces yes it is this has been in the back of my mind for six and a half years that's longer than i was in college for i was in college for five years and i still dropped out so how about that packing peanuts i was right that's a good sign we got a packing slip here august 6 2014. wow this was the summer between high school and college for me wow me buried treasure does this count as nos yet like you know new old stock where you find uh people auctioning off like old parts from dealerships like unopened packages from the 80s and 70s and stuff like replacement parts for cars i feel like that's what this is debbie put this in the box you go debbie this has been in the box for a very long time i hope you're still out there and if you're watching this video you did a good job because it stayed together for six and a half years foam i remember these okay so how these pretty much work is there's leds on here and they light up wow yeah yeah they're they're pretty sweet and they would flash like i don't know if some of you guys remember the 5th gen camaro stuff like those tech nostalgia taillights where you hit the brake lights and they kind of like flash once before they stay on for like a little bit extra attention these would do stuff like that it's pretty much just a little panel that goes behind the plastic lens you don't even take out the old housing or anything it's just in there and then this seals it or supposed to seal it didn't seal it for me because mine got wet and i knew that because it actually shorted out my tack and made the car do all kinds of weird stuff because they were like connected to like some some stuff in the car was connected to the same fuse as the taillights under the fuse box with like the six prehistoric fuses in it it did all kinds of weird stuff and it freaked me out so anybody want a vintage packing peanut from the vintage box uh if you order a shirt let me know in the comments and i'll give you a packing peanut from this vintage box i'm sure people would love that i don't know go prove it wrong stapletonautoworks.com get yourself a shirt and i'll put you a peanut in there cool all right let's go back out to the garage and put these things in okay so first of all excuse the background banging over there he's like building something but that's the other business in this building so can't really control what they do um gotta get a good ol phillips head screwdriver to get these panels off and i haven't taken these things off probably since i spray painted these bezels also back in 2014 and this is like some you know adhesive tint film also if you were wondering a lot of this car is a time capsule of stuff that i did a very long time ago and it's kind of fun to go back in here and fix things for lack of a better term stuff that i didn't know how to do the right way back when i was 18 that i now have the expertise figure out oh my god can you stop i'm just glad they're not playing music anymore sometimes they play music over there and i can't film because of copyright stuff and it sucks because there's literally nothing i can do about it it's like regular old coarse thread screws where cars now they have their own you know every bolt has like a threaded spot and it's a nice bolt not just like hardware store nonsense it's 1970s stuff i guess they're all different and you'd never know hey don't eat my hardware roger you want to do it here do it did he bite it yeah i wanted to like bite it walk around with it take it somewhere here here do it leave him alone i thought he was gonna be helpful i thought he was gonna start doing it bezel piece off before you can access the rest of the screws for the plastic lens cover dammit gone forever now you can see this car did get repainted but you can see in here um they didn't strip the whole thing down because it was just a you know to fix it not to restore the car you can see the original green color in here still from way back that is the color that this car came from the factory with did he eat my screws no he just messed them up oh thanks i got one more over here also i didn't know that it needed these to stay in i thought it looked better without these like old looking covers over them so i remember for a while i took it completely out because i thought it looked cleaner like this and then the lens like fell off so i had to put it back on see that's pretty much all there is to it gotta have that that'll keep the water out congratulations you are installing the latest technology in automotive lighting in your monte carlo is it really the latest technology though because i mean this is six and a half years old something you might not notice is these older cars do not have a high mount tail light in the the back glass like newer cars do cars didn't start having those until the 80s and trucks didn't have them until 1994. so really all you got for other vehicles to see that you're stopping are these two little bulbs right here and i put black plastic over them so they're even harder to see which makes complete sense i must have really wanted to get rear ended back in the day that's what she said anyway yeah so i do like the leds that they're brighter and i like that flashing feature for that reason tech nostalgia it's the same brand as the camaro ones wow see that tech nostalgia that's crazy i actually had no idea yeah from what i understand they just kind of chill in there but we got to take the old bulbs out i like that it doesn't require any like real modification to the car like you're not you know bastardizing your classic car to put these in it's just kind of like a toss it in and forget about it kind of thing can i not get a light bulb out no i can't i'm an idiot it'd be cooler if you were blonde so we could do like a blonde joke about how many mitchells it takes to get a light bulb out more than one if i remember correctly these wires are the ones that need to be tapped into to uh wire up the other ones so they're kind of important here comes the mariachi music so we will resume this in a little bit i thought he turned it off for a second damn it okay so i was kind of confused here didn't make a whole lot of sense as to what to do with these wires well i found the actual instructions online and it turns out that my packet is missing an entire page of very useful information now i know what to do and this just got a whole lot easier i'm really not surprised we fried them the first time i put them in here if it was missing that page too it was only a matter of time before something blew up so the issue i'm trying to figure out with this is which one of these black wires does what one of them should be this thought like the ambient just light on and the other one should be the stop light that brightens everything when you hit the brakes and i don't know which one that is so we're gonna have to hook the battery back up and test it manually that's that's what's been stumping me on this is just none of this really makes a whole lot of sense it's just not the same color it's not the same color as the factory uh harness this must be a replacement of some kind from somewhere along the line so the instructions the scattered ones that came with and the ones that i found on my phone don't match up so once we figure that out we should be able to tell what goes where and not fry these things again so they're both on right now i just turned the headlights on so this is like ambient just tail lights are glowing um you can see there's two different filaments in there i guess that's how that works i never really looked at like an old school light bulb in depth before i always just rip them out and throw them away but yeah will you be able to go in there and poke the brake pedal so i can see what does what how do you open this rocket push the handle and pull the door you gotta poke the button i did try harder i don't want to break anything is it locked i think you just have to push the button harder [Applause] yeah just push it harder yeah push your purse down and like open it good job all right poke the brake pedal okay yeah we'll see that and now we will test these i don't have enough hands for this so i'm gonna have to do the testing and come back to you guys with results so didn't have enough hands to do it um because this test light doesn't have a little clippy thing i just had like a good lucky wedging in there while she hit the brakes i was able to conclude that this black wire is the stop wire there's a tail light and a stop according to the diagram and this one is supposed to be red but it's not so i put a little piece of tape on it because that'll do it um i guess we just have to cut these off now and i think this yellow one is the turn signal but i really don't know i'm not sure we're just winging it they just shut the music off the trunk i think they're done i think they're done they just shut the music off and the truck pulled out we might actually be able to do some actual work here that is so annoying it's not their fault they're not annoying it's just annoying that they do that i don't know it's like once they know that you're trying to do something over here they turn it up louder yeah i swear to god they do it on purpose it got progressively louder as we've been back here because they heard you talking it would go up yeah because they're probably like oh it's so annoying when they talk over there when i'm trying to work in silence and then they just turn it all the way up just to just to ruin my filming i wonder if i could just blast like creative commons music in the background over here just to have a loud background and i'll just yell at you guys how about that i don't know it's a struggle but hey we got to work at night we got to work at night that's just how it goes we'll get it done either way if you don't have some wire strippers like these i highly recommend some kind of a game changer do you see how they work i feel like you're you don't you don't fully appreciate what you're looking at here i will demonstrate okay so as i take this fragile piece of circuit board and beat it up you just stick it in there and how about that wow isn't that way cooler than the pinchy kind yeah pretty freaking sweet anyway let's get to putting these in and see if they work well now we know where the wires are going to go so we got to put the board actually in there and replace um this top piece where the old socket was we got to put a grommet in here the grommet comes in the kit so i'm just going to you know try to put this in here somehow maybe i'll get it in without looking like an idiot i don't know probably not but i would like to point out that you can still buy these things um i know mine are six and a half years old like we've covered a couple times before but those kits are still for sale like opgi and stuff like that so if you have one of these cars i would recommend them because you know before this debacle when i actually did have them on there they look pretty freaking sweet and we are gonna get to see how sweet they actually look once i get these put in so we got this fish through there as my knee pops because i'm old man 24 really just just falling apart these days i guess um yeah i got a little fish through there these just kind of lay in here and then they want you to take these foam gasket things like with those i'm going to use the new ones and you put them over there put the lens on and the lens being on this one holds these down uh but we're not gonna do that right now i'm gonna wire them make sure it's all good before i go ahead and screw them all in i think we've all been there where you know you put something together and you're all confident and gung-ho bolted all up it's good to go and then something's messed up and you got to take it apart and that sucks we're gonna wait for the final assembly until we know they work i don't really know how i feel about this the official instructions give you wire nuts i don't really like that but hey you know i'm not want to disobey the instructions so we are going to use these and i am going to like it because it's easy don't tell anyone okay so i've got the ground hooked up the stop and the tail wire is hooked up let's look at the battery see if it works um ruger was doing some gobbling again so we had to put him away because it was disgusting really distracting it said don't hook them up while the battery is still hooked up so i'd lesser disconnected to connect everything stand back there while i pull the lever see if it works yeah wow doesn't that look so much cooler it does i can see on the gopro that it's like flashing yeah it doesn't look like that yeah it's not doing that in person here let me hit the brake pedal see if it gets brighter yeah it looks so weird on the gopro yeah it looks better see how it that is so much brighter awesome well um i did hook up the turn signal wire but uh when i tried to bench test the turn signal with the test light just to validate that that yellow wire is what that is return signals don't work at all so that's a separate problem for a different day not the first time i've had this happen with this car i think this thing is 49 years old actually might be 50 technically because if it's a 72 model year it was probably built in 71 and it's 21. so 50 years of nonsense in this wiring harness so i can't can't really give it any i can't complain it's you know it's been through a lot so yeah let's uh let's get into get the other side done put the covers back on and see how this thing actually lurks um you know when it's working but i'm gonna unhook the battery again so i don't fry that one this side all wired up with you know our super fancy supplied wire nuts and whatnot i still feel kind of weird about that but i'm gonna go hook the battery back up and test these things do you think i messed it up no you have like a perfect dog print on your leg yeah i had to there's another one yeah that's what i'm talking about it's like a perfect paw print pull the knob is it going to work yay promise they're not actually flashing in real life it just looks like that awesome they both work freaking sweet man those are so cool looking let's uh let's get these covers back on and shut some of the lights off in here so you guys can see how they actually work and what they look like in you know the dark because man it just looks this is like the perfect blend of modern with the old it sounds really stupid but like i think you know what i mean if you don't get some taste i guess so to put these on this gasket being around these little tabs in here you like show the tabs they're here there right there right there that's what holds this in place and once this is over it and tighten down that is actually how this whole bezel unit thingy stays in here it's really really simple and it's really simple it's not anything it doesn't need to be that's for sure i think it would look better maybe eventually i'll cut the uh the center grates out so it's just a ring i think it looks kind of like a lincoln logo or something it does this is weird it might look cool once you put you know it all in yeah i'll get to your piece of plastic it's a little bit dirty with this sorry alex bowman you're sure it's gonna work good for wiping this off actually maybe it's not it's pretty dirty uh yeah we're gonna clean these and come right back because they're gonna be really hard to clean once the lincoln logo is on top of them these are all clean now i still got the og tint film on them that me and my friend austin did back in high school and you bet your ass i'm gonna leave it on there cause this is some this is some history right here i'd see her get new lenses before i peel the tin off of these just for nostalgic purposes there's no really place for anything it's all just kind of floating around in there this old car stuff these kind of have to reach pretty far to squish the foam down so i'm not gonna like crank them down all right away i'm just gonna get them to bite a little bit and then progressively tighten them actually you know what one of those screws is sticker up here and it doesn't recess into here because i used one of the thinner ones back here you used a bit on that see i think that looks dumb i'm gonna change it now i'm taking note that these thick head ones were the ones that held the lincoln logo on and the tiny recessed ones are the ones that went up in that bezel so they don't stick out um inside here so live and learn i remember that now so we don't make the same mistake twice oh i was right the amount of screws that came off here did not um you know it was missing that when i took it off but there was only two of these tinier countersunk ones so i saved those for the sides and put the bulky one on the top because when you're standing your line of sight never sees underneath there so i'd rather have it up there…