Having recently purchased an "Oldie-but-goodie" '88 27 foot Winnebago MH on a GM chassis, I been sorta busy restoring various areas and items back at least somewhere near what they were originally. Most of the heavier duty stuff has been accomplished, so I decided to work on the illumination provided at the rear of the MH, by a good general cleaning, as well as improving the reflectivity in the inner structure of the individual light modules.
Most MH's seem to all use pretty much the same actual fixtures for their interior and exterior lights - these are much the same as the ones on our Kit 5th wheel, which I have also worked on in the past to improve light output.
Some might figure that they do little actual night-time driving, so the lights are sort of low priority - but remember, the brake lights and turn signals ARE used, even in daylight - and wouldn't you sorta like those to be easily seen, even in direct sunlight?
SO, here's the routine - first remove the light lens(es) for an inspection - mine look like this:
Not too bad overall, other than the relatively small and DULL reflector surface - the lenses themselves are in good shape, so a simple cleaning of the interior of the module and bulb is accomplished, then I cut a piece of aluminum foil a bit larger than the light module case, and wad it up a bit to provide irregular reflective surfaces for increased light reflectivity:
Once carefully opened up, and gently formed shiny side out, to the inner surfaces of the light module, it looks like this - be VERY careful to NOT allow the foil to contact or potentially short out any of the light bulb wiring - tape or various small dabs of glue/cement can be used to hold the foil in place if you feel it's needed:
OK, button it all up, and check out the results - the pic below was taken in broad daylight, the cluster on the LEFT has been worked on, the right side is still stock - the low res quality on Internet photos is deceiving, and while not greatly evident here, there IS about double the light output on the modded lights, and instead of a rather small central glow from the lights as seen on the right side, it can be seen that ALL the lens surface is lighted on the modded lights on the left (in this light switch position, only the upper and lower outer modules are lit:
SO - if you, like me, feel that BEING seen is as important as SEEING, you might want to consider "performance enhancing" yer RV lights as well as some of your other stuff...
good job & thanks for the idea !
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