{"id":5758,"date":"2022-07-08T15:19:27","date_gmt":"2022-07-08T21:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/grunschev.com\/wordpress\/?p=5758"},"modified":"2022-07-08T15:19:34","modified_gmt":"2022-07-08T21:19:34","slug":"you-spent-5-hours-on-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/grunschev.com\/wordpress\/2022\/07\/you-spent-5-hours-on-what\/","title":{"rendered":"You Spent 5 Hours on What<\/i>?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve had the Lotus for twelve years now. I still love it. But sometimes it’s a bit of a chore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But why only two bolts?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cheap-ass plastic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it only took 5 labor hours: 3 for me, 2 for Michael.<\/p>\n\n\n\n