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I am in the process of replacing the wiring harness on a 41 110 and the trunk light is missing. Does anyone have a pic of what the trunk light looks like in its real habitat? I have a small hand full of extra lighting fixtures but none of them are obviously the correct fixture. They say a picture is worth 1000 words! I tried searching for pic’s and parts and the closet part I found was a picture of the license plate light retainer.

Any help would be appreciated. It’s going to be nice to have lights this season and not have to worry about burning down the car with the old dry rotted harness!

My '40 is not right, so this may not help. There's sone kind of cover plate missing, but the holder may be right. Thing is, it doesn't put out much light.

What I did was buy a pack of these. They are closet lights. Cheap. Magnetic (they give you a metal disk that sticks on one side, so I could put one in my glove box) so you can easily remove them for charging, LED, rechargeable, and motion sensitive. They come on when you open the door and go off 20 sec after you close it. They have a remote control, too. Much brighter.

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Thanks for the pics. I am finding out how hard it is to find any parts for these things. You pics give me ideas of what I can do in the mean time because I really don't think I will find the original fixture for the truck light. Thanks again.

I don't know how similar the 47 and 41 lights might be but here is my 47 light and an exploded view of a 49 light done by another poster. These assy's are almost identical and screws onto the lid. I suspect the 41 could be very similar too with differences being cosmetic. The bulb turns on via a mercury switch when lid is raised. Depending on year power came from the tail light circuit so only worked when tail lights were on or, in other years, was off body feed and would turn on any time the lid was up.

The mercury switch is in a sealed glass assy that slides in the elongated socket and there is no modern replacement I am aware of. In fact in the early 50s Packard got rid of the mercury switch in favor of a rolling steel or brass ball inside an enclosure that also slipped inside the socket like the mercury switch. The ball rolled down to short two contacts together and light the bulb. Like the mercury sw, those ball contacts were also prone to oxidation or developing an insulating film deposit and sometimes stopped working. Sometimes vigorous shaking will get the contacts working again but oftentimes not so something else needs to make the connection.

I repaired mine by adapting a modern burglar alarm mercury tilt switch to mount external to the socket and hidden on top of the assy. A spacer was needed inside the long socket to take the place of the original switch and bring the wire close so the bulb could still make contact.

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  Packard Trunk Light.jpg (95.50 KB)

Dyslexia strikes again. I just realized you are asking about the rear (trunk) LICENSE light. On a 40 160 it's buried in the handle, unless the car has a trunk rack, then it goes in a larger fixture to hold the license and light ithigh up on the trunk lid.