LIGHT ME UP

One task I spend a surprising amount of time on these days is changing bulbs on cars – be they for indicators, headlights, tail lamps or whatever. To some extent, that has always been the case, but I am a little surprised at how few people will tackle this at home.

Of course there are cars out there which seem to have gone out of their way to make the task a challenge – particularly for headlights.

But things like brake lamp bulbs tend to be pretty accessible even on late-ish model cars. I had one come in the other day where all three brake lamps had died. Now you could be forgiven for thinking there must be some problem with the circuit. But no, it was three dead bulbs. They had probably keeled over one at a time and the owner took a while to notice.

Weirdly, Ed Guido has the opposite problem on one of his cars – an E39 BMW. All the brake lights are working perfectly, but the dash keeps popping up a fault. We’ll have a closer look at it one day, but in the meantime it gives him something to yell at.

It’s really not difficult to check these things, particularly if you can grab a willing observer for a few seconds. Otherwise, the old trick is to get it near a surface that will ref lect a bit of light at night (almost anything) and look to see what happens as you run through them. Ditto for checking headlight alignment.

Here are a couple of thoughts for those unafraid to get our hands a little dirty. The quality of incandescent bulbs seems to have gone down over time and I’m seeing them break and fail more often. Keep a few spares at home – they’re not expensive.

Second, if you’ve been doing some body work or the car’s come back from a repairer, double-check everything. Wiring gets disturbed and people forget to plug things back in.

And if you see someone with no brake or tail lights, maybe give them a hoy – there’s a chance they simply don’t know.