The Fog Lights

As with everything on this Jeep, the fog lights had seen better days. The plastic was very faded, one of the lenses was broken, and the reflectors were rotten.

These are some of the hardest parts to find, even in mediocre condition, and when they pop up the sellers always seem to be savvy to the needs of JP Jeep builders and ask outrageous prices. So I needed to figure something else out. Many people use generic fog lights that look good enough, but I wasn't ready to settle yet. The plastic shells on mine were good physically; they just needed some new paint, but they definitely needed new guts. So I went on a quest to find similar lights that had guts that would fit. It was difficult to find dimensions for the insides of similar lights, but I somehow (probably someone on jurassicparkjeep.com) eventually came upon a couple models of fog light from English manufacturer Ring. In my case, I only needed the lenses and reflectors, so model RL021 was enough, but if you're in the market for a complete lookalike set, the RL020G has stone guards and might be your best bet.

The reflector and lens are very close to the OEM dimensions. They're actually deeper, making it a very tight fit, but they do fit within the OEM light shell with careful cable arrangement. I hope they don't end up being too close to the plastic stone guard and melting them!

These lights aren't generally available in the U.S., so I bought them from an eBay seller in the U.K. Shipping was nearly the cost of the lights, but it wasn't too bad in total.

Then disaster struck.

Weren't proper lights, they weren't

I bought a single set of these fog lights. That is, they came packaged in a single box as a set of fog lights. But one of them was the "driving lamp" version. It had a different lens and narrower beam pattern.

Just what I needed: my typical luck of buying a new product and getting the wrong thing when it's an import.

The seller was baffled but offered nothing but Ring's phone number. I ended up playing ring-around-the-Ring by email, being told to return them to the retailer for exchange and explaining that I'm in the U.S. and didn't want to pay the shipping back and forth for the whole set when all I needed was the single part. I wasn't opposed to paying for it—not that I wanted to of course; why couldn't I just get the right dang part to begin with? I finally got someone else who asked for photographic evidence of the mismatched lenses. Once I provided that they posted me a replacement light. So yay.

Finally, with a pair of matching light guts in my possession, I was able to assemble some restored fog lights good as new-esque.

(I wire-wheeled and painted the screws sometime after the picture.)

Cruddy brackets

Next up were the brackets for the lights. They looked like everything else of course. And the bolts that hold the lights on the brackets were barely recognizable. It took some serious torque to get them out.

I had heard about using oxalic acid for removing rust, so I decided to give it a shot. It worked surprisingly well, but I think the rust was a bit too heavy for it.

I still wanted to clean them up further. They were going to need a sandblasting.

Unfortunately, my cheap sandblaster is old and tired, so they needed a thorough wire-wheeling and sanding by hand.

Much better.

These eventually got painted, but it looks like I never took any pictures of them. So pretend they're shiny black.