My turn signal light burned out in my Jeep a couple of weekends ago. I didn’t know it had burned out at first. All I knew is that the turn signal light on my dashboard would stay on all the time, and if I wanted to turn right, the signal would click twice as fast as usual. Also, after going a mile or two on the freeway my dashboard would start beeping. The same beep you get when you’re low on gas or there is some engine problem. Except this beep would just keep going. It was relentless. It would only go off if you signaled to turn. So I pulled off the road and inspected my Jeep. Sure enough, my right-front signal light was out. Shucks.

This weekend I popped the light fixture out to take a look and hopefully replace the light. Unfortunately I ran into somewhat of a problem.

Here’s the light in three pieces. The bulb part (to the left) broke off from the base (upper right). And The fixture that you plug the light into is also there (bottom).

A closer look at the fixture reveals a lot of corrosion (blue green) in the socket.

You can still see a little bit of water in the light housing. I actually poured about a half a cup of water out of it when I took it off the Jeep. I guess that’s a good indication of bad things whenever you’re dealing with electrical parts.

You can’t really tell from this picture but there was also water in the socket where you plug the light into the electrical system of the car. The plug part (not pictured and attached to the jeep) also had a bit of corrosion. So now what should I do? Take it to a dealership and try to get new parts? *sigh*

I also took a look at my other light, and while there’s some moisture in the housing, there certainly isn’t a pool of water in it. So I’m trying to figure out how all that water got into the housing. It’s either from a small crack near one of the screws (which I doubt) or from the socket, which had water in it. The working light didn’t have any water in this part.