I have an 04 dyna low rider and added a maltese cross taillight to the sissy bar. It only has a red and black wire. I assumed red would be running lights and black brake light but can't get it work as running / brake light for the life of me.
I thought i could just tie in to existing taillight wiring but can't seem to figure it out. I think the ry and ow wires are taillight wires i need to tie into if I'm reading the manual properly.
would i need a load equalizer?
the bulb in cross taillight is dual filament so it should be slow to work as running light and brake light.???
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

The cross tail light seems to be a case ground type light. One wire will go to Blue and the other will go to r/y, O/w is typically for fender tip light, you just need to run a ground wire from the outer case of the light to a good ground.

 

Your 2004 FXDLI is a three wire run/brake/turn system. The brake/run function on the rear brake light is also a dual filament bulb with a three wire circuit, one wire for each filament function, run and brake, and a common.

Basic two wire brake-run-turn systems use a resistor circuit upstream or at the bulb to change the intensity of a single filament bulb from the dimmer run to the bright brake or turn function. Your 2004 FXDLI has a 3-wire brake/run system and you cannot directly connect this 2-wire light you have to give you the dual functions you want. You can have run or you can have brake, but not both. To get run and brake brake lights, you will need to fabricate a 3-wire circuit to change the intensity of the bulb for each function. That is not difficult or expensive to do.

It only takes a couple of cheap diodes and finding a resistor value to give the incandescent bulb the run intensity you want to make the two wire lamp circuit on the cross into the three wire dual intensity circuit you need for your brake function...There are many wiring diagrams and parts lists on the interweb.

This is a lot easier to do if you change out that incandescent bulb in the cross to a LED...connect a 2K ohm 1/4 watt resistor between the striped (cathode) ends of the 1N4005 diodes and connect one of these connections to the light and each of the other diode leads (anode) to each of the two wires from the brake light. The third wire is ground. The run circuit runs through the resistor dimming the lamp and the brake circuit bypasses the resistor and puts full current on the lamp making it brighter. The diodes isolate the brake and run circuits from each other.