Life's never that easy. Getting the seal around the housing was trickier than I thought. As soon as I got one side on, the other side would slide off. And then vise versa. But after ten minutes the housing was back on the car. There, a simple job done, and the car looks better than it did.
Then I discovered that the light wouldn't turn on anymore. Dang it! The same thing happened with the taillights. I checked the bulb, and that looked fine. When I replaced it, the bulb briefly blinked on, but I couldn't keep the light steady. I tried tightening the housing's nuts, but that didn't help either. What was going on? This light worked like a charm before I touched it. How could I have broken it?
Then I noticed that I only had one wire to disconnect when I removed the light housing. Since that red wire was probably the positive wire, the light must use the car's body as the ground. That's not unusual for this car.
Since the seal around the light was new, the only way the light could touch the body was through its nuts and bolts. I checked under the engine's deck lid and cleaned off some of the muck that was on the inside surface and added a couple of washers to help with the connection. Since I needed to remove the nuts to put on the washers, I pulled the light off again and cleaned any area where metal touched metal.
Yea!
I could have just closed the lid on this job and called it good, but then there would be this weird, clean area around the hole in the deck lid, and that just points out how filthy the rest of the lid is. I needed to clean it all.
This isn't a job that can be done with a quick wipe. There's 52 year's worth of grime on there. I'm tackling it with a spent toothbrush and my old friend, Kitchen Grease Goo Gone.
I've got about a third of the deck clean so far, and that took me about 30 minutes.
We'll see how it looks in a couple of days.
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