Lighting up the fog

 "Forget everything else.

Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant.

The past has been lived already, and the future is impossible to see.

The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it.

Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead." - Marcus Aurelius

 Fun stuff lately.  I took a night shift off work to attend a seminar on Medicare (government run healthcare that kicks in at age 65) along with the wife.  That was not too exciting, but we both learned a bit about all the idiosyncrasies of the program.  I won't bore you with that stuff, but of course since inception it's been made unnecessarily complex and difficult to understand.  Also if you don't enter Medicare at a specific time, you pay penalties *for life* if you enter it later than that - which was mainly what we were there to find out. 

I've also begun some of the winter preparation items.  There are still too many bugs flying about to bring in the wasp traps, but I've opened the heater vents in the basement.  I've closed the vents to the crawl space.  The hoses have been blown clear and put in the shop, and the batteries are on trickle charge - with the new transformer-based chargers.

While I was doing the previous repairs on the Subaru, I noted that one of the fog lights on it had gone out.

I'm a big fan of LED bulbs - mainly because they don't burn out as often as incandescent bulbs, and they are pretty bright.  I hadn't replaced all of these bulbs with LED bulbs yet for a reason:  This car was hit and damaged so badly that the insurance company wrote it off.  The owner then brought back with a "rebuilt" vehicle title.  The vehicle is bent, and the passenger side of it isn't quite right - the headlight assembly is loose on the car, and so the aim of it isn't very good.  I figure that with normal bulbs, a slightly high headlight beam isn't quite annoying as it would be with a very bright LED bulb.  So I've skipped replacing the headlight bulbs - for now.

Once I saw the dead fog light, I decided to swap those to LED bulbs, because the fog lights don't seem to have serious aiming issues like the headlights have.  For some reason, automotive headlights all seem to be designed to emit only blue-white light - or else they emit weird colors.  I would have preferred to install a long-lasting LED bulb with 4000K halogen color.  Unfortunately, there seems to be no such device.  In lieu of a normal-looking color, I ordered bulbs that emit 3000K - what I would call "urine yellow".  This is not the color I would have preferred, but it's OK for fog lights.  It's also preferable to 6500K retina-searing blue-white bulbs - when aiming them is questionable due to vehicle damage.

Once I removed the fog light reflector housing, the reason that the bulb had failed was obvious.  The bulb is held inside a ring by three lock tabs, and an o-ring seal keeps water out of the assembly.  Below is the non-damaged housing from the driver side.

The passenger side - which had been hit by another car before I owned it - was missing the locking ring.  This was probably damaged in the crash.  The bulb was only being held in place by the o-ring seal.  It had finally vibrated out of the socket.  Once the bulb fell loose, heat from the bulb melted the reflector housing.  At some point, likely during a drive on a wet day, water spray probably hit the hot glass envelope of the bulb.  It then shattered it from the differential temperature.

Below:  Glass and melted plastic from the reflector housing, and what remained of the failed bulb.

After a lot of work and cussing, I was able to get the old housing re-installed, this time with the LED bulb held in by only the o-ring seal.  I found a replacement reflector housing on Ebay, and that one is in good condition - hopefully there will not be another bulb failure before it arrives.  I'm sure there is plenty of road grime inside the current reflector housing, and the new bulb will eventually fall out as well if I don't replace the housing.

For now though, it seems to be OK.

Final Update (one hopes): 5 October 2022

The replacement reflector and bulb housing arrived, complete with a bulb and a bit of chopped off wiring harness.  I installed it after removing the OEM rock screen.