I drove the Jeep M-Th this past week since the weather has been great, just before daylight on Thursday a guy pulled up next to me at a stoplight and told me I had a brake light out. This afternoon I took a look and what I found was the drivers side was really dim and the passenger side was really bright, both filaments in the 1157 were burning hot. I traced wires, checked voltages, grounds, cut out old Scotchlocks used for trailer wiring in the past and patched the wires. I checked the the wiring at the steering column and was getting 12 volts and finally pulled the taillight housings. I was getting 12 volts to the back so I ran direct grounds to the housings and eventually determined that the taillight circuit was backfeeding the brakelight circuit due to the 1157 socket losing ground to the housing on the passenger side.
Since the 1157 socket was steel, I spot welded a washer to the back side of socket as an attachment point for a direct ground and that is when the day took a turn for the worse. I partially melted the wires and even though they needed a patch I made it worse. When I cut and pulled the wires from the socket I realized the spring that holds the contacts to the bottom of the 1157 would not compress. I pulled the spring and found a weld booger on the inside of the socked and I could not file it down or get to it with any tool I had in the shop. I finally grabbed a large drill bit and was able to grind out the booger but that was just enough to keep the bulb from locking in place.
The socket appeared to be assembled by inserting it from the rear and rolling a flange on the inside to hold the socket in the housing. I never considered grabbing the tail of the socket and twisting it in the housing and that might have corrected the problem. But the design still sucks picking up ground through the pot metal housing to the bolts holding the housing to the body.
I was disgusted and went inside to eat dinner and cool off.
I was sitting there staring at the TV and asked myself, what would Foose do in this situation...create, improvise?
Surely not dick around with 1157 sockets!
I started thinking about the 3157 bulbs and how easy they are to change and they are wired for ground, but the sockets I found on Google images didn't look like they would work without some real hack-fab creativity and a lot of JB Weld. I decided I had nothing to lose and I went back to the shop and clamped the tail of the 1157 socket in the vise, grabbed a 1" bit and cut the flange holding the socket to the housing.
After I removed the socket, I used a carbide burr in a die grinder and cleaned up the flashing, I did not enlarge the metal that projects from the front of bulb side of the housing.
I grabbed the housing and headed off to O'Reilly's and this is when the day became incredibly better after screwing up royally.
I found a GM 3157 socket that was a *tight* press fit in the housing, I knew I could make it work so I grabbed a pack of bulbs and two sockets and headed home.
The conversion worked great!
Here is a shot with the taillights on and since it's so hard to quantify brightness I turned the taillights on in my Chevy. The second shot is with the brakelights on in the Jeep.
Hope this helps.
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