04.29.06
On replacing the right light bulb.
A few days ago, the front left turn signal in my wife’s Geo Metro stopped working, and so one of my chores today was to replace it. I went down to the garage with a pair of screwdrivers and the new bulb, expecting that it would be a pretty simple repair.
A 1997 Geo Metro is one of the cars with an integrated headlight-and-signal-light unit that’s accessed from the front corner of the engine compartment, so I popped the hood and went to work. The lens is held on by a couple of obvious clips, so I removed those. No luck; obviously there was something else that needed to be unfastened on the bottom, too. The next obvious thing to undo were a couple of large screws holding the entire light unit on. I removed those, and still no luck — there was something holding it on the outside bottom corner, which I couldn’t figure out how to get to.
This, I concluded, was the appropriate time to read the documentation, in the form of the owner’s manual. The owners manual explained that one didn’t actually remove the lens or the housing at all, but replaced the bulbs by reaching in behind the light housing, unfastening the socket, and pulling it out. It went on to say — and this is only a mild paraphrase — “Reaching the socket to unfasten it is actually physically impossible unless you are a leprechaun. You will want to take your car to the dealer and let them do it.” Back to plan A.
Some more investigation found the third screw holding the headlight unit in place, hidden in a cavity behind the bumper that I could either look into or reach into at any given time, but not both. So I removed that while contemplating the pipes running across the ceiling, and pulled out the headlight unit, and pulled the socket out of the now-accessible back of it, and discovered a small light bulb entirely unlike the one that the parts store had sold me to replace it.
A small light bulb which, to all appearances, seemed perfectly intact and functional.
Some further testing of the corresponding lights on the other side of the car informed me that what I had just gone to all of that effort to access was not, in fact, the turn signal light at all, but merely the parking light, which was just as functional as it appeared.
So, thus enlightened, I reassembled the headlight unit with only slightly less effort than had been required to disassemble it, and then replaced the actual turn signal bulb, which is in the middle of the front bumper behind a lens that’s held in place by two quite obvious and quite visible screws that are, as it turns out, entirely trivial to remove and replace.