I was washing my car last night and noticed that the passenger side headlight seemed a little loose. After inspection, I found that the rear bracket that holds the cover on the hideaways was broken just above the two screws :mad I used some super glue to put the bracket back together but I know that's just a temporary fix.

Is this a common problem? How hard is it to replace? Will I have to worry about matching the paint or can I replace the bracket without replacing the painted cover? Is this a good time to go to euro lights?

Any help you can give will be appreciated. :flag

 

Good to see you again sleepie,

When I purchased my car used, I also was washing it and found the same thing happened to my headlight cover on the passenger side and the guy swore up and down he never hit anything and I never saw any indication that the car had previous damage. so I repaired it as follows:

Remove headlight cover and bracket and lightly sand the underside (non painted) side of cover surrounding area to be glued.

sand lightly the non painted side of the bracket...don't sand mating surfaces.

buy or obtain some light guage sheet metal approximately 2 inches by 1-1/2
inches.

bend the sheet metal 90 degrees lengthwise... now it should look like a corner 3/4 inch by 3/4 inch by 2 inches long...got it?

now take the broken bracket piece and kinda hold it in place of where it belongs on the cover........ take the new formed braket of metal and hold it next to the broken piece..... you are going to use this sheet metal piece to reinforce the broken braket in place.

align the broken braket piece and the sheet metal braket together and transfer mark the oblong screw holes onto the metal braket and drill new holes into the metal braket.

remember how you sanded the surface around the broken braket and the braket pice? Well now you are gonna epoxy the sheet metal braket to the cover and the broken piece (I keep mispelling bracket)

epoxy the broken piece where it belongs originally and then epoxy the L sheetmetal bracket to the broken piece and to the cover ....clamp in place with something or paper clips if nothing else ....this "fix" will last forever and the best part is you won't have to buy a new cover and have it painted which would be very exspensive and maybe not match too good. If you need me to show you how...... send me your e-mail and I'll make you a drawing.

:cheers:

 

Wow, thanks for the detailed directions Scuba :cheers: That fix makes total sense once I see it explained, but I would never have thought of it myself :conehead

I'll try that this week. Your directions seem clear enough but if I hit a snag I'll send you an email. Thanks again :cheers: :thumbs:

 

I have never heard of anyone using this fix for anything either....I stumbled upon it when I had a 90 C-4 and the screws stared pulling through the door panels and enlarging the holes. So I was totally against buying new door panels when the ones I had were perfect except for a few screws were pulling through the enlarged holes. So I thoght about it for awhile and decided to laminate thin sheet metal in back of the panels and epoxy the sheet metal in back of each hole. and re-drill the holes and this worked. the key part is that ABS plastic will not glue well at all, so you have to sand the area to be glued, so that the epoxy will have something to bite onto. For sheetmetal, I used roof flashing as it is the perfect guage and works awsome for this repair and is really cheap and can be found anywhere.

Good luck! :cheers:

 

Has anyone had the pin on the headlight leaver arm fall off. The cap must not have been put on properly if at all and after 16,000 miles it vibrated out and gone. What is the diameter of the pin? Thanks. :confused: