It’s always fun to discover that something you thought might have been complicated was, in fact, an easy job. Last week a man pulled up alongside me at a light, tapped his horn, and waved for me to roll my window down. I took a moment to think about whether I had any bumper stickers or other adornments on my car (I don’t) and went ahead and rolled the window down. He let me know that I had a brake light out, a fact I was completely unaware of, and then wished me a merry Christmas and sent me on my way.
Have you ever replaced a bad bulb in a taillight? I never have, nor to my recollection have I ever actually had the plastic outer casing on one break in a way that would require it to her replaced. I think maybe the Escape had a crack in one of the taillights but that was one of that car’s most minor issues and I never bothered to fix it. I wasn’t even sure who to go to about that; I know the oil change places will check your lights for you, which implies that they’d swap the lights out if needed, but I’d never had to have it done.
Turns out it’s super easy. On my car, there are four bolts holding the taillight cover in place, and once you remove those (just a screwdriver, nothing complicated) you can easily pull the cover off; it’s being held in place by three plastic tabs in addition to those bolts and takes a touch of wiggling until you know exactly where they are, and after that it’s just a matter of removing the bulb (twist a plastic thingie to pull the bulb out of its housing, then remove the bulb via a very similar motion,) testing it, and putting everything back together. I had a little bit of trouble getting the new bulb to seat properly but I was able to replace both brake lights in maybe 20 minutes even with that slowing me down. The second one didn’t need replacing but the new LED lights came in a four-pack and since I was replacing incandescents I figured I might as well swap them both out so that they matched and to keep myself from having to do it again in the near future.
In short, if your brake lights go bad, at least look into replacing them yourself; having done this once I’m never going to even consider paying someone to do it in the future. I can easily imagine cars that are a bit more complicated, but I suspect on most passenger vehicles it’s genuinely something you can do with no particular mechanical skill.
So yeah. I changed two lightbulbs today. Yay me!
I had five little bits of adulting I wanted to do around the house today; this was one of them, and as of 6:44 PM I’ve completed two others. We’ll see if I get to the last two jobs or if my PS5 and the book I’m reading eat up the rest of my night. My wife reminded me this morning that I have most of two weeks left to Accomplish Shit so I don’t need to get too far ahead of myself just yet.