Facelift Tail Light Repair

B

Brunocrossley

Member
Has anybody successfully spilt open a rear light cluster of the type with LED tail lights? My drivers side unit has gone very dim.
Replacement units are £285 from BM, but they can't give me a lead time.
Lamp 1.jpg
I have removed the unit and can supply the internal wires with 12V, with no improvement in brightness. So my next step is to access the lamp driver pcb. It might be poor connections or faulty components. Access is the difficult bit.

Can I split the external lens from the body of the unit? It looks like the lens is plastic welded on. THe LED assembly looks like it is a sub-assembly within the larger unit. My other idea is to cut away an access panel, with a view to plastic welding it back together afterwards.
Lamp 2.jpg
I'm okay with electronics, it's the mechanical steps that I'm worried about.

Ta, Mark
 
I'd be tempted to go down the ebay / breakers route (£40 / £50 perhaps). Not a common fault I would think.
Robert.
 
Cheers Robert,
Theres a selection of ebay pre-facelift units, as you say £40-£50 a go. I haven't found a facelift version though. There's a new one on offer on Ebay from Lithuania. £260 + shipping and VAT etc.
Has anybody bought from that part of the world?

Lamp 3.jpg
At the moment I'm thinking that cutting out a panel, following my red marking, might allow access to the LED driver card.
 
Brunocrossley said:
There's a new one on offer on Ebay from Lithuania. £260 + shipping and VAT etc.
Has anybody bought from that part of the world?
Click to expand...

I’ve bought quite a few smaller parts from there from various sellers. They seem to bulk buy outgoing stock from dealers etc. My only advice would be if you go down this route use a credit card/PayPal etc from financial protection incase an issues arise :thumbsup:

Also don’t forget customs charges etc. I was £65 on a £240 water pump and stat recently
 
Lamp 4.jpgNot a bad attempt at guessing where to cut. I've saved the piece for later.

The pcb is marked with a Hella part number, which could be useful. The card is located by two pairs of pegs in the small central holes.
Lamp 5.jpg
The LED's shine down the three red light pipes. The alignmet of the pcb and the light pipes will be important.
Lamp 6.jpg
The two supply wires connect to the board through an IDC (Insulation Displacment Connector). Not the most robust or or imune to corrosion. All the connections look clean though.
I've tried a supply through the white and grey wires, and also direct onto the pcb, and the LED brightness doesn't improve. The current consumption doesn't change either. The overall brightness isn't particularly 'bright'. I'll investigate the pcb itself next. I can probably find more efficient LED's, they've moved on in 15 years, but matching Right and Left lamps on the car might be a fiddle.
I was hoping to find an obvious failure, but that would have been too easy!

I'll report further after the weekend, but if anybody has already done this, please put me out of my misery.
 
Hi Bruno, I notice that there are three or four Facelifts being broken on ebay at the moment and while they don't specifically mention light clusters, chances are they will be there for the taking and fairly easy to remove from the breakers point of view. So I would imagine they'd be quite keen to do a sale. Good luck.
Having said that, it looks like you're making good progress on the investigation :thumbsup:
 
Plan B is definitely chasing down a working unit.
Not found one yet. If anybody has a unit gathering dust, please give me a shout. My MOT is due in two weeks.
 
Hi Mark,

Great work on this, something I've meant to investigate myself one day. As you said, I expected the hardest part would be accessing the electronics and then sealing the unit again afterwards. Good approach going in through the side and a good guess where to cut :thumbsup:

Have you got a close up photo of the component side of the board? I wonder if it's the driver or the LED which has failed?

Used facelift tail lights go for around £120 on ebay. Curiously there seem to be more left lights than right lights for sale :?
 
Here’s a phone pic of the board. I can take better ones at work.
E5D8D419-0AE7-473E-BB1E-1D9FFCA75EDA.jpeg
The LEDs light up red. I’m not sure if they are less bright than they should be or whether they were mis-aligned with the light pipes. More fiddling necessary.
 
It is an interesting design in there! I feel like based on how far you have got to and on how expensive those units are, you might take a bet and venture into replacing the LEDs, see how things go and if not better replacing the regulator/driver that is on the board. You look like you have the right equipment (did I mention I am jealous? :D ), if it works you have peace of mind for the MOT and can always do the same on the other side if it was not matching, if it does not you will only loose about £5 (and have to spend the price for the whole unit ) :|
 
Some progress this morning. The two outer LED's both stand at 1.8V. The centre one has 9 volts across it, limiting the power to the other two.
Lamp 7.jpg
I've removed the suspect part and will choose something new that will hopefully match the other two for brightness. If not I'll swap all three and tweak the supply so the drivers side lamp matches the passenger side. Baby steps.
 
Sorry I am late to the conversation, but I have heard that you can put the light in the oven and it melts the glue that holds the light together, without damaging the lens.

Here is what youtube reports when you search for Separate headlight
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=seperating+a+headlisght
 
DashingDaryl said:
Sorry I am late to the conversation, but I have heard that you can put the light in the oven and it melts the glue that holds the light together, without damaging the lens.

Here is what youtube reports when you search for Separate headlight
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=seperating+a+headlisght
Click to expand...

Doesn’t work on E85/6 headlights. If you try on the rears I’d suggest using a spare. I’d doubt it would work on the rears also.
 
Cheers Daryl,
Having cut the side of the unit, I’m not sure taking the lens off would give enough access to the pcb to be able to remove it for repair. I’m not sure though, so maybe!
In other news, I have now fixed the pcb and the light now works. I tried several different LEDs until I found a type that matched the light output of the originals. Having satisfied myself that they looked okay, I swapped all three LEDs on the board. DC48551E-D042-4B74-AAAB-31F278F9F61C.jpegThe phone pic isn’t great, but the right and left lamps match each other. All I have to do now is reseal the access hole. Chuffed.
If anyone wants details of the LED part number and the board mods needed, give me a shout.
Mark
 
Good work! I gave up long before I got near to a solution and bought a replacement unit. I still have my old unit, so would love to know LED part No. and mods. Worth doing and putting on the shelf ready for next time, as these parts will only get rare/more expensive in the future.
 
Well done mate, great work! :thumbsup:

I'm also interested to know the components & mods required.

Good luck with the MOT :driving:
 
Unit is now sealed up and back on the car. The new unit matches the appearance and brightness of the original one on the left.
Here's a quick run down of what I did, in case it's of use to anybody.

I removed the lamp and used a scalpel to peel back the foam gasket for reuse later.
Lamp 2.jpg
The grey and white wires supply the LED printed circuit board. Grey is +12V. The spades are different sizes so you can't get them the wrong way round. It might be worth putting volts directly onto the wires, just to rule out any loom or connector issues before butchering the lamp.

I then tried to work out where to cut an access hole. The board is right up against the outer shell of the lamp, so don't cut too deeply.
Inked Lamp 3.jpg
I used a 1mm drill bit to cut a couple of sighting holes to check my guess before I cut. The red marker was slightly off. I used a Dremel with a cutting disc, and was slightly over-enthusiastic. A hot knife blade type tool might have been tidier. I saved the removed piece for later.
Lamp 4.jpg
The pcb is located by two pairs of pegs, but just pulls off to reveal the LED light pipes. I haven't tried removing the red/orange lens, but from what I've seen. I don't think that would give access to the PCB.
Lamp 5.jpg
Testing the PCB revealed the central LED to be faulty. (In this case too many volts across it) It was removed using a hot air rework station.
Lamp 7.jpg
There were no manufacturers idents on the LEDs, so I tried several different ones of the correct size until I found a type that gave matching light levels to the remaining two.

The package is a PLCC2 and I was happy with a Broadcom part HSMZ-A100-T70J1 available from RS as order code 496-6774.

Be aware that the LEDs only work one way round. They usually have a notch cut from one corner, but there isn't a convention for their polarity. My new ones have the cathode to the notch. They also have only two large paired contacts. The old ones are marked the other way round and have four smaller legs. only one of which is a cathode.
As it worked out, the replacemt for the central LED could fit straight onto the existing pads without any messing around.

However, as I can't leave anything alone, I decided to replace the other two LED's, just in case. The tracks for these each needed some mods to work with my chosen LED type.
InkedCut Track.jpg
The L/H LED needs one track cut at the point of the orange dot, to isolate the lower left hand pad. (Ignore the other track cut, which was unnecessary)
The R/H LED needs two track cuts where the dots are. This isolates the top right hand pad.

The LEDs could then be fitted. I've marked the orientation of the LEDs with red dots.
LED Orientation.jpg

Re-assembly is the reversal of the dismantling process, as they say, so...
My next step was to fasten the pcb back into the lamp. It sits back on the two pairs of pins, which align the LED's with the light pipes. I added small drops of superglue just to be sure. I fitted the lamp to the car and confirmed that the appearance matched the original one.
My intention was then to glue the access panel back, but a kind colleague beat me to it and plastic-welded the piece back into the apperture using a heat gun and 3-D printer filament. He'd rubbed it down and sprayed it by the time I'd come back from lunch, so no pic.
Cheers Jon! Cheers David!

Working lamps.jpg
 
Absolute legend.

I suggest buying as many broken ones of these as you can find and fixing them ready for sale and exchange!
 
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