Tail light wiring question.

[Bwake]

I've just bought a 61 chevy stepside and the tail light wires are broken, twisted and spliced together. I need help! I have white, black and (maybe purple) coming out of the frame. The tail lights that I purchased from Classic Parts have an orange wire and a black wire. Can anyone tell me how to hook them up?
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[ChuckW]

Get a voltmeter and ring out the wires. Will take you about 10 min.

[GVDobler]

Without a meter and a wiring diagram, you are working in the dark. Pun intended.
One is probably running lights one is probably brake/signal light and one is probably ground.

With a meter you can turn the lights on and see what wire gives you a steady voltage. That would be the taillights.
Turn on blinker and one should give you an interrupted voltage reading and then the brake pedal should give you voltage only when pedal is pressed.

Then it should be easy to figure out which goes to what wire on the new fixture.

You can do all of that by just touching the wires of the taillight to the frame wires and sort them out.

It is just easier with a meter. $10-20 will get you a good digital meter that will last for years. Any radio shack, auto store, hardware store.

[Bwake]

I will test the wires but I'm still a little confused about the hookup since I have 3 wires from the frame but only 2 from the tail light pigtail. Assuming 1 wire is tail lights and 1 wire is brake lights that leaves me with the last wire that should be turn signal. There is no where to hook it unless it ties in to one of the 2 wires that comes from the lights. If the turn signal wire runs to both lights how does it determine which light gets the signal? I hope I don't sound like an idiot.
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[rossboss]

The black should be your tail lights the purple shoud be left blinker-brake and the white should be the right blinker-brake. As far as your after market tail lights you'll have to hook them to a power source to find out which wire is dim and which wire is bright. Dim being the tail lights and bright being the blinker-brake.

[tincan1966]

You only need three wires- brake lights use the same wire as the turn signals.
Whichever wire has voltage with just the headlights on will slit into two wires(one to each side) for tail lights. The remaining two wires should be a left brake/turn and right brake/turn. There is no seperate wire for brakes lights IF wired correctly.

On your new lights- the orange wire is the brake/turn signal, the black is the tail lights.
The lights are suppsoed to be self grounding thru the mounting studs.
If you look farther up the frame, you should find the original wires, there wil be a brown, yellow and green, unless someone has re wired the whole harness from front to back.

[61_FL_Apache]

There is only 3 wires to the harness.. One is for the parking lights, one for the left stop/signal and one for the right stop/signal. Sorry I dont know the colors but you should have a connector at the end of the frame rail on the drivers side.

[gimmy 64]

there is also a wireing diagram in the faqs section that should help you it did me.

[Bwake]

Thanks guys! Now it makes sense. I'm going to replace the whole harness at some point, I just wanted to get some brake lights going so I can drive it a little. Thanks again for the help.
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[Slow Build]

Just in case you wire them up and they still don't work. I had to run a wire from the tail light buckets to the frame for a better ground.