Nice informative video, John! I especially like how you wired in the 900 flashers with it to get the true AMR vanbulance effect. Cool piece of lighting history!
I had a guy from AMR posted a comment (which he deleted for some reason) saying the side flashers were NEVER on the ambulance flasher and were on a loud clicking flasher. I know sometimes the side flashers (especially in the 9M) were on an edge flasher, but edge flashers don't click and obviously sometimes they were on the ambulance flasher since there is video of it (it is not just my semi-old-guy memory). The clicking flasher was likely a headlight flasher, which happened to get deleted from a lot of vans at the same time (bulb failure probably). Correlation isn't causation.
The "red only strobe" option was also debated because that is not a standard AMR setup. It is rare enough I shouldn't have put it in the video, so rare it might have been a build error or field/shop mod. Most of them are wired like the 9M (all strobes or none). But again, the strobes that flashed "back and forth vs. in and out" strobe patterns had them on seperate wires, with additive switching. At least at the bar level they were
enabled not disabled via adding a wire. I'm not saying it was common to make use of that, but the red strobes were occasionally wired in with something else, just like the white strobes were sometimes in with primary (how often I have no idea). The most common was clearly the strobes being their own thing as a set of four.
The truck setups varied a lot from truck to truck even though they were "standard". I can confirm from 15+ years of ordering ambulances that three consecutive build number trucks from any manufacturer can be a little different. I had a pair delivered once where they followed the specs differently and partially on each. We ordered the white rotators/sweeps to be on a separate switch, and the red rotators to be in with primary only. The idea was you could kill the white "moving lights" and there was no need fo a separate "red lightbar" switch. Put the truck in primary and you can run code with the option to kill the most distracting white lights with the other switch. The trucks showed up with one having the white rotators on primary red on separate switch and the other had all rotators on the separate switch. I changed it, but would AMR?
I also think the variety of grill, intersection, and rear options on the vans muddies the waters a bit. Some had a pair of rear strobes, most had halogen/strobe (later LED) combos for grill/intersections. The rear strobes could be found on secondary sometimes, and separated out other times. I am never going to cover all the switching options nor should I have mentioned them. It really opens up the comments to "but on the one I ran on" type stuff.
I think my point about the bars being fairly constant such that they caused redundancy of warning lights was clear, but it seems to have been taken as a coverall statement about the whole setup of all AMR trucks. I really just wanted to show that one seemingly odd version of the edge could be paired with any of the many truck setups and meet any of the various requirements.
tldr; - The bars had triple K lights and were used in applications where that was both necessary and some where it was redundant. While the trucks varied their setups, the bars varied less. The strobe switching and side flasher were the only real differences despite a long list of truck related differences that really don't attempt to cover.
