when i used to fish at nite i wired up 3 55 watt lights on the back of my truck one on top of cap center and two under the bumper. i had em wired so they lit when i went in reverse or if i hit a switch on dash. tail gate me at nite and i'd tap the switch 170 plus watts coming on at once got folks attention. one trick i heard about was wiring a sparkplug near end of tail pipe. kill ignition with car in gera let it sucl some nice rich mixture all the way through then fire the spark plug. always wondered if it would work. course when i heard about it it was pre pollution control.
Well, it wasn't quite so dramatic as your anti-tailgater setup, but I liked the reverse-light setup on my old Dodge Daytona back when I was in the Navy. The (manual) transmission selector had a ring on the lever which you had to pull up on, with the lever in a Neutral position, to allow you to pull the lever over all the way to the left and up into Reverse. Well, the backing lights would come on when you pulled that ring up and popped the lever over to the left, before you pushed up into R, so on the relatively-frequent occasions that I got tailgated in Hampton Roads (lots of young hotheaded guys driving sports cars in HR, like any other Navy town), I just pulled it out of gear and turned the those backing lights on.
People tended to back off pretty quickly, for some reason
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My dad told me a story about a guy, friend of his, who did that spark-plug-in-the-exhaust trick with his sports car back in the day. A cop pulled up behind him at a stop light, a buddy he recognized, and he thought "Hey, he doesn't know about this little trick yet, let's scare him a little!" Flipped the switch to activate it and gunned the engine, and a big fireball roared out of the pipe and up over the hood and roof of the cop car. Needless to say, his cop buddy was not particularly amused... Flashing lights came on, much hilarity ensued, and I think Dad said the guy got out of it after paying for repairs to the damaged cruiser. Granted, I can't attest to the truth of the story, but I always liked it anyways.
