The Rice Lives

So, one of my left side rear brake lights has been out for a while. Been lazy, but safety is this month. Got home early tonight and checked it out as I was unloading cargo. Pull the socket out of light assembly. Hmm, the bulb is shattered, and the socket is rusted. Use a rag, crack of most of the other jagged bit of bulb left, and managed to extract the bulb. There’s water in the socket. I pull the other bulbs out, there’s moisture inside the lower housing, the other bulb and socket is rusted together. It appears there is a poor sealing corner of the lens, and there is no drain on the bottom of the assembly. There are little tube vents, but they are placed at the top of the comparments so they wont drain anything until the lenses are completely full. They aren’t meant for that. I go to the spare FX. This is a common problem. The left side is actually ok and I squirrel the bulbs from there. The right side is horribly rusted, because the lenses are half full of water! Oh, and from the splices in the harness, these sockets have been replaced before. So a word of advice to any other crazy people with Toyta FX and FX16’s, check your rear light brake clusters. Chances are they are filled with moisture and rusted. You might attempt to squish some kind of sealant into the seam on the outside corner between the red and amber lenses, it looks like that is where it leaks in. You might want to attempt drilling some drain holes in the bottom too.

Oh, and the title? There are still remnants of riceyness that pop up, stickn it’s little head out to irk you, and here is one. The bulbs that are in the brake lenses, the RED brake lenses, get this, are blue.

Rice Rice Baby

Now the headlight bulbs I just replaced are very lightly tinted blue. They tout them as being brighter, but really what its doing is changing the color balance so it closer to daylight white. Not these, as you can clearly see, they’re quite blue. So what you get is the blue tint allows mostly blue light, cutting the rest out, and then the red lens allows only red through, equally in the end, less light. You can see it comparing the clear bulbs I changed out with those blues that I didn’t have enough to replace. This just doesn’t make sense. And why are there these dual filament bulbs even available in blue? Anyway, I’ll have to replace the remaining offending bulbs as soon as possible. I’ll probably have to cut and replace the rusted sockets too. And figure out something about the moisture traps. Fun fun.