I went out last night with the intent of installing the window. Before I got that far, I cleaned the garage. It felt great to organize a little bit.
When cleaning, I noticed a junkyard part that I had pulled a few weeks back. It's the socket for the blinker / marker light in the front.
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I pulled it from a junkyard because of the notes that I had from the previous owner:
"lights are okay, headlights are okay
-front passenger marker light doesn't work - not the bulb it's the socket
-rear lights are good
-blinkers work sometimes but other times just stay on"
I removed the battery tray and took a good look at the socket that was already installed. Sure enough it was wrapped in electrical tape all over:
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So, I decided to replace it with the one I bought from the junkyard. I snipped the two main wires (brown and blue) and then used
this technique to connect the junkyard socket to the wiring. I don't have a sodering iron, so I had to make do. I figured that the junkyard socket was cheap ($2?) so it was worth the experiment. You all probably already know or noticed that there is a third wire going into the socket in the pic above. It's a black wire leading into a plug thing that you can pull out. Well, I reused that on the junkyard socket. When I pulled it out of my original socket, the end of it (the metal part) was wrapped in
aluminum foil. I s*** you not. So I removed the aluminum foil and part of it broke.
After I was done, I tested again. There was honestly no change. So, I swapped the bulbs. The passenger marker light came on, but the driver's marker was off. It would seem like a simple bad bulb, but the catch is that both bulbs illuminate fine when the blinker is actually on. It's only when the blinker is off that one of these bulbs isn't illuminating.
Here is a picture of the bulb that actually illuminates when the blinkers are not on:
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I found some spare bulbs in the truck, so I tried swapping those in. They would not illuminate unless I actually turned on the blinker(s). I am completely dumbfounded, because the part number ("2057") is on them just like the bulb that works. Here are the spares:
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I am at a loss. I know that I should replace the broken third wire that goes into the socket, so I'll try to snag that from a junkyard this weekend... but the socket seems fine. It "behaves" just as it should, so long as the magic bulb pictured above is inside of it.
This issue probably has such a simple root cause. Let me know if anyone can teach me a bit about this stuff. One final comment... the passenger blinker is slow as hell. It works, and the bulb illuminates, but it takes 5+ seconds (maybe even 10+ seconds) in between flashes. I presume that's a clue. I am going to look through other threads on the forum to read more about it.