Part 1: Overview; tires/brakes | |
Part 2: Underhood | |
==> | Part 3: Headlights: the Big Schnoz |
Part 4: Inverter pump | |
Part 5: Coolant testing | |
Part 5b: Engine coolant | |
Part 6: Transaxle / driveline, references |
The entire nose of the car is one large plastic piece, and knowing how to remove or at least loosen parts of it paves the way toward accessing many other things. In particular, there are some tricks that many professional auto techs use with modern car construction and flexible materials to greatly shortcut various disassembly procedures that otherwise seem cumbersome in the repair manuals. |
With the front edge of the fender-liner now freed up, it can be bent downward
to expose the coolant storage thermos.
If this was a steel piece like back in the old days, the entire thing would likely have to be removed, probably meaning removing the wheel and some other parts first. That's why mechanics love this plastic stuff -- it makes quick access like this possible. Of course the fender-liner *can* be completely removed with a little more work, as shown here, but we don't need to in this effort. [Although I'm sure there were more than a few garage guys who would bend aside steel parts with impunity and just mangle 'em back into place afterward, figuring the customers would never notice a few odd kinks and wrinkles in parts of a car they never ducked under and looked at.] |
Here's the big key to the nosepiece, though: behind the fenderliner edge is this one magic non-obvious screw that holds its outer corner. |
Removing the screw allows that whole end of the nosepiece to be gently unclipped and flexed outward. |
This trend continues all the way around to the front and under the headlight
module, which has its own integrated clips that support the nosepiece too.
At this point if the remaining S-clips around the front edge underneath and the parts around the other fenderliner were removed and freed up, the entire nose of the car would drop off and leave it more or less looking like this. |
In fact, all three headlight fasteners are identical shoulder bolts with a dark finish, just with varying degrees of rust depending on where they were located. |
Then the ring can be pulled away, and the ribbed part around the lamp base slides off where it grips around the metal back end of the bulb. And all of this fits together at fairly crazy angles. |
It is said that halogen headlights become dimmer over time, or at least the manufacturers would want you to believe that and maybe replace them prematurely. This is with ONE of the lamps replaced so far, using these "xtravision" units claimed to be a little brighter than stock. Can you guess which one, from this or the big picture? Give it an honest try, and then look here for the answer. |
However, there is no question that lamp filaments progressively degenerate over time, and most of that is due to metal loss and eventual weakening. A thin spot on a filament burns hotter, thus throwing off more metal, which makes it burn even hotter ... you get the idea. After five years here's the state of one of the old lamps. The low-beam filament on the left has a definite grainy appearance which comes from parts of its own tungsten metal vaporizing and flying off, in a phenomenon called sputtering. Similar roughness is observable on the marker lamp filament shown before, too. In a quartz-halogen lamp, the metal vapor lands on the hot glass envelope which is designed to throw it right back inward and hopefully land back on the filament and reduce overall loss, but one can see that there are several other parts in here that can collect stray material. In fact, look at the end of the support wire above the low-beam filament -- it's growing little whiskers, and those surely weren't there when the lamp was new. That all had to come from the filament. Compare against the high-beam side [it's clearer in the big pic], which shows just a tiny hint of sputtering but frankly hasn't gotten nearly as much use over time as the low-beams. |
Many lamps don't burn hot enough or close enough to their glass envelopes to
really heat them up to metal-rejecting temperatures, and those lamps gradually
turn dark over time instead -- the other phenomenon we've probably all seen.
Now, it would be safe to say that a lot of the distance this car has gone *has* been in daylight hours, especially on roadtrips where I actually want to *see* what I'm passing! So my old lamps could have somewhat fewer running hours on them than for other drivers who put in a lot of night-time miles. Anyway, dropping in a pair of new lamps can't hurt at this point just to give more relatively worry-free miles before suddenly becoming a "padiddle" in the middle of the night. But besides capturing the procedure for knowledge's sake, there's another ulterior motive for pulling the driver's-side headlight assembly -- read on to find out! |