Toad Brake Light Repair

We hope you and yours are able to have an enjoyable 4th of July weekend!

Looks like we may have a bit of a storm in the area, but after that blows over, we are expecting some pretty good weather.

We are in Virginia Beach where we have been for almost two weeks.  We've been busy and gotten a lot of things done.

One of the items on our list has been to get our car tail lights fixed so they operate when we tow it behind the Roadrunner.  When we were getting ready to pull out of our last campsite at Charlottesville KOA before coming here, we had a failure on the brake lights test.  Not much we could do about it then, so we drove up here.

Yesterday we stopped by the Honda dealer and had them look at it.  Ugh.  When we had the CRV initially wired for towing, they wired a second light in one of the receptacles in each brake light unit.  The bulbs were too close together and shorted out after melting some of the plastic inside the unit.  Melted light bulbs, melted plastic, shorted wires---a recipe for disaster!

If you look real close in the middle you can see the melted plastic and bulbs.

We were glad we caught it before anything bad happened.  The Honda mechanics said the brake light unit had to be replaced on each side which was no surprise.  $654.55 later and we had two new units ordered.

Then we went over to Tidewater Auto Electric.  They estimated it would be a $250 job to get us fixed up.  We picked up the brake units this morning from the Honda dealer and went over to the Auto Electric shop.  Their technician took a closer look and said we could get LED lights for the two bulbs on each side for replacements and probably could do the work ourselves.

Good enough.  We went over to Auto Zone, paid $42.91 for four LED bulbs and went to work at Kelly and Jon's.

We took the new units out of the boxes and held it up to the old unit.

Next we carefully measured for the additional light in the new unit.

Then cut a hold, carefully put the bulbs in the sockets and then secured the new brake light unit on each side.

The install took less than half and hour and we were glad we could do it ourselves. Figured we saved $250.  It was still a pretty stiff bill to pay for a faulty original install but all things considered we were glad to get it fixed and be done with it.

Thanks for joining us today on the Roadrunner Chronicles!  And have a happy and safe 4th!