Started as just light sprinkles, and then over the course of the next couple of hours turned into some heavy rain for about 30 minutes, and then a nice slow drizzle for a couple of hours.
So since it was raining, and the humidity shot up to >60%, I didn't want to sand down the other fog lamp reflector and expose clean, bare metal to high humidity. The other reflector is bagged up with some desiccant, so no worry there.
Last night's project was to remove the headlight washer nozzles and tubing, and to remove the last bits of the headlight "whiskers" from the car.
The "whiskers" are trim pieces that fit between the header panel and the headlight bucket, and they snap into some punched holes in the sheet metal header panel, the panel that goes between the headlights at the nose, as you can see below. The "whiskers" are soft-trim items, molded from a somewhat flexible plastic, but after 30+ years in the Kalifornia sun, they turn hard, brittle, and start to warp and curl between the attachment points. Then they crack, split, and fall apart, or shatter when you try and remove them, leaving the clips and chunks of plastic that look really bad.
This one one of them, new-in-the-bag from Toyota.
And the 20mm plastic hole plugs I bought for the "rear wiper delete" also fit perfectly into the holes vacated by the washer nozzles.
While headlight washers are a nice idea, the only ones I've ever seen work really well are the ones on old Mercedes cars. Besides having a "fluidic" nozzle that sprayed an oscillation pattern of fluid on the lens, they also had a wiper blade to clean it off. Typical Mercedes Engineering, and it probably added $1000 to the price of the car. The ones on my 1969 Corvette sprayed fluid on both headlamps, but that's all it did. And I didn't think it did much to keep the headlights clean.
So, some additional work was accomplished last night, and since it's drying out now, I can get back to Other Things to work on.
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I'm a believer in Rain-X for headlights. Usually good for a few hours in the worst of conditions.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to pick some up when I stop by the auto parts place to get some more Gunk.
ReplyDeleteI just changed out the headlights on my niece's 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee. $79.99 total for both assemblies, free shipping, just pop out the old bucket which included the wiring, lens, reflector, bulb, the whole Magilla, and popped in the new ones. Took 10 minutes.
ReplyDeleteYes, the old assemblies were solid plastic, and the new ones were the same. They last 15 years, change them like air filters, piece o' cake.
My Grand Cherokee has 'plastic pods' like that. My previous GC also had them, and I replaced them with some eBay units because I didn't feel like buffing the OEM ones.
DeleteExactly. I tried buffing the old lenses with that crap you see on TV, it looked OK: for about a month, maybe less.
DeleteI envy you your climate out there. If you lived here in Appalachia, and the humidity was in the sixties, you'd be saying "the humidity plummeted to..." ;-)
ReplyDeleteHah! A buddy of mine in Houston says the same thing. A "dry" day there is 85% humidity. There were a lot of summer days like that back in Illinois, too. I'd clean parts in the morning, and they'd have 'flash rust' on them by noon!
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