the previous owner totally screwed up the illumination light in my cluster. i guess they didn't work, so he ran a bunch of new wire, cut this, cut that, splce this, splice that, but it still doesn't work. SO i'm gonna run a completly NEW system. WILL this WORK: (i drew a picture diagram for fun

 

You shouldn't have to ground the toggle.

 

oh, allright, even better, but what power source do you think is best, i hate to splice into just anything

 

There should be a fuse labeled illum (i think) or something to the same effect. You could wire staight to that if your trying to bypass the stalk switch.

 

why not just try to restore the wiring back to what it should be, as opposed to running more stuff? i might be misreading this, if so, then sorry.

 

i restored the original wire, and everything is perfet, cept on thing, my dimmer is shot. 3RD ONE i've ben through, i was going to just simplt replace the dimmerwith a toggle of some sort. BUT my "mechanic" neighbor said this would cause some over heating and mybe melting because the dimmer has a built in regulator/something the "calms" the electricity flow down. Is this true? anyone else NOT recommend replacing this with a toggle??

 

It wouldn't hurt to put a toggle switch in as a replacement for the dimmer. The dimmer gets so hot because it's basically a variable resistor, and all resistors get hot. A toggle switch doesn't act as a resistor, simply a mechanical "connect", or "disconnect", so it shouldn't even get hot. As for the regulator part, I really don't know, but if you want you can buy a capacitor from radio shack, and hook it up in parallel. That will act as a regulator, wouldn't think it to be necessary though.

 

You should be able to put a switch there. I don't see why not. You could always just connect the wires directly to each other and eliminate the whole thing. Of course then you would have a hole in the dash to fill....