Technical Parking light repair 54 belair

I hadn't had any luck sourcing the turn signal buckets for my 54 210, save for some sketchy ebay chinese repops for $50 each so I decided to see if I could rig something together, and stumbled on something really, really easy. hopefully this helps someone else out.

I had a ton of rust in mine, and I just wasnt getting good contact.

I took a pair of pliers, and gently popped the socket out of the housing, and then roughed up the areas the bucket needed for ground. it slightly deformed when I removed the old socked, so I also gently tapped the hole flat again

after measuring, I headed down to the local O'Reillys, and found a universal replacement that matched the 3/4" hole for $2.99

I bent the little tabs in so the socket would slide in, and then used the holes in this old trailer bumper to told it steady while I drifted the tabs out with a hammer and a screwdriver.


so far pretty happy. I did have to make some wire splices, I used the original wires coming from the distribution box, and just made sure I had the two wires connected right with wirenuts before I made a permanent connection, only because I'm an electrician by trade and kind of ocd about colors matching on wiring if at all possible. all in all, took about 5-10 minutes a side. like I said, hopefully someone finds this helpful!

 

did good - next time clean housing more and spray area where bulb goes with silver

 

thanks! I would have prepped and painted them up all pretty, but it was barely above freezing today and I get yelled at when I spray indoors

 

Those will last about a year before the ground becomes less & less reliable. Pull the wire & plastic out, & braze or solder them to the bucket & they'll last … white paint will produce a better background.

 

it does look like the original paint was white.

solder isnt a bad idea, but I think I'll just see how it goes for now, since I'll be pulling them next spring to paint anyway

 

Surprisingly one of the car magazines did a test with different backgrounds in the reflectors of tail light housings. Painting them white reflected more light than silver paint or aluminum foil.

 

that makes sense.

 

3 year update, car lives outside 100% of the time, and they're still working fine.

 

Cool, thanks for the update.

 

I had a bit of fun trying to polish up and nickel plate mine, but overall the light output from lights like these relies mostly upon accurate location of the bulb in relation to the lens rather than the light thrown forward from the reflector.
White paint works just as well, amd is a lot easier.

Someone repaired one of mine by welding(!) a new holder in place, which offset the bulb a quarter inch or so. That causes the light to be split and thrown away from central.

Phil

 

Way to go, glad that worked for you. With some of the new products the metal is so weak once you bend them they break. Tried to bend some around pot metal housings and all the tabs broke.
On sheet metal a little thinner it looks like it worked.