Tag Archives: Headlight

You Spent 5 Hours on What?

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I’ve had the Lotus for twelve years now. I still love it. But sometimes it’s a bit of a chore.

Leaving last month’s LoCo meeting, Chad pointed out that my driver’s side headlight is out. Sigh. Here is where I try to make a joke. How many Daves does it take to change a lightbulb? On the other hand, I wonder how much I might have been charged had I taken it to the Lotus dealer for the replacement? Note that the Lotus dealer is Ferrari of Denver.

The process is not exactly straightforward. You start by taking the front wheel off. From there, remove part of the wheel well liner to access the back of the headlight housing. The manual says to remove the three “socket head bolts”. That’s probably just a poor translation from English to American. I wouldn’t call them “socket head bolts” as they’re properly removed with an Allen wrench. In this particular instance, there are two rather than three.

After removing those fasteners, you just lift the cover off and it’s a relatively easy task to get the old bulb out and install the new one. It probably only took me half an hour to get to this point. Halfway there, right?

But why only two bolts?

Cheap-ass plastic.

The bolts thread through threaded clips and the clips are slipped over plastic tabs. And the plastic tabs break. One was completely broken, which explains my shortage of fasteners.

When I went to put it back together, it quickly became clear that it was a hopeless task. So I called on my resident mechanic to supervise.

I asked him if he had some glue that would do the job, but I knew it was a bad question as soon as I uttered it. Almost immediately I asked if, perhaps, we could bend some metal over it and fix it that way.

I’m not a fabricator, so I don’t have any bits of metal easily to hand. I thought maybe we could use some aluminum from a pop can, but as soon as I cut one up it was obvious it would be way too thin.

Luckily, Michael is a fabricator of sorts: he customizes die-cast models of big rigs. He found a piece scrap of scrap sheet aluminum that looked like it would make a nice repair. So, snip here, trim there, find some appropriately sized nuts and bolts, drill some holes, et voila! Job done. Well, something like that. We had to do this with both bolts. (And I probably should have done it for the missing one, too) It took a bit of fiddling to get things in the correct place, as all this has to line up with the holes in the back of the housing. But we made it work, and the cover is now more securely fastened than it was when we started.

And it only took 5 labor hours: 3 for me, 2 for Michael.

The Trial of the Headlight

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I don’t know what it is about the headlights on the Lotus, but it seems like I’m always replacing the bulbs. That’s an overstatement, obviously. I’ve had the car nearly ten years now and although it seems like I’ve replaced a headlight bulb a dozen times, it’s probably more like four or five.

On my Ohio trip my passenger side headlight died and last week I finally got around to replacing it. No trip to the store was required, or so I thought, as these bulbs are sold in two-packs and I still had a new one from the last time I did this.

Under normal circumstances, changing a headlight bulb is your garden-variety pain in the ass. Jack the car up, dismount the front wheel, remove the fender liner, unscrew the three bolts that secure the headlight cover, swap the bulb, then put it all back together.

Taking it all apart, though, it became obvious that it wouldn’t be the garden-variety pain in the ass this time. The bolts thread into little brass fittings that clamp over a piece of plastic. On the passenger side at least, one of the three brass fittings is missing. And the plastic where all three fittings go is broken. To be completely honest, I think two of the three were broken last time we replaced a light bulb. To continue the honesty, it may be that I’m remembering the plastic being broken on the driver’s side. So the problem likely exists on both sides. I’m going to ignore the driver’s side until one of those bulbs fails.

After a couple of hours of labor it became obvious that we wouldn’t be able to secure the headlight cover back on the car with the plastic all busted up. Before we started this operation the headlight cover was in place and secure, but we were unable to return it to that state.

A quick search of the internet provided some bad news: a replacement piece from Lotus will cost something on the order of $650. If you could order one. To say these parts are made of unobtanium wouldn’t be an exaggeration.

One fellow said he’d placed an order, but none were available. This was from a rather old forum post, but even if they were now available, I don’t particularly want to spend $1300. Because with the condition these are in, even if I didn’t think the other side was busted up the same way, it would look really silly to have one brand new one and one beat up one.

Michael found another forum posting about how these things could be fixed. That thread had a couple different flavors of the same solution. We’d buy some wire strapping from the plumbing department of the local home store, cut and fold and drill as necessary, and rivet them in place.

We only did two of the three mounting points. When we took it apart, only two were connected. And with the repair it’s much more secure than it was when we started all this.

The end product wasn’t quite a pretty as the second photo above as we had to enlarge the hole a bit to get the bolt to align with the fitting. But after some judicious Dremel work we had our fix completed.

In the end, Michael and I spent on the order of six hours over two weekends to replace one light bulb. The only supplies we needed to purchase was the 10′ roll of tab tape. It was the smallest quantity we could buy, but at least there’s plenty left to repair the other side when that light bulb calls it quits.