Lessons in Light Bulbs

File this one in your "Ryan is an idiot" folder.

If you've ever found yourself behind my Civic after dark you might have noticed that one of the two tail lights on the passenger side was out. A few have pointed it out to me thinking I wasn't aware - I appreciate the concern, had I not known I certainly would have wanted to.

The light got knocked out several years ago when my dad inadvertently backed into the Civic. The bulb got replaced (by me) and that fixed the brake light, but for some reason the low intensity tail light didn't work. I figured there was probably a fuse issue or something, but didn't really dig into it.

[Insert soothing voice of Robin Sigars reading "The Little Acorn"] And time moved on...

I decided yesterday to take a stab at fixing it / getting it fixed. I knew it wasn't likely to pass inspection with it out. I thought before paying someone to fix it I'd mess with it (that's a technical term for trying to fix something when you have no idea what is wrong or what needs to be done - it pretty much never works).

Thankfully this particular model Civic was designed in a way that makes this particular bulb easy to get to. Two screws and a quick disconnect of the wiring harness and I had the fitting loose where I could look at it.

I inspected the bulb, both filament wires looked fine.

I pulled the bulb from the socket, looked fine.

But that was when I noticed that on one side of the bulb there were 3 contact wires and on the other there were 2. So I looked down in the socket and sure enough on one side there were 3 metal contact pads, on the other side there were 2.

The light bulb in my head finally came on. I stuck the bulb back in the socket (3 metal pieces against 3 metal pieces, 2 against 2) and presto! Working tail light!

5 years of a tail light out came down to the fact that I stuck the bulb in the socket wrong and never realized it.

Like I said, put this one in the Ryan's and idiot folder.