Typically, being England, the weather decided to make things worse. It started raining, and a thick fog started enveloping parts of the motorway, forcing me down to a very low speed. It took an age of driving with my nerves on edge, but I made it home eventually. On the return journey the weather was clear, but I still had to make some of the journey in darkness. I arrived back at my flat and parked the car, and it has not moved since. I then set about getting a replacement headlight.
After asking on the Young Morris Minor Owner's Facebook group, I learned that replacing the headlight yourself is a very simple task, but I needed to make sure I bought the right sort of headlight to replace the broken one. The two main types are sealed beam units, and halogens. Sealed beam units are what the Minors rolled out of the factory with, and what my car clearly had. Halogens are an aftermarket upgrade that people often install, due to the halogen bulbs being far brighter than the sealed beams. They are very common, due to them being a factory item on Minis later in production, and the parts are directly interchangeable with the Minor. Halogens also differ from sealed beams in that the actual body of the headlight with the reflector has the halogen bulb inside it, as a separate entity. This means that, when the light dies, it's just a matter of pulling the old bulb out and replacing it with a new one. Sealed beam units, however, do not have a separate bulb. The filament is contained inside the headlight unit in a completely sealed cavity, hence the name. Essentially, the headlight itself IS the bulb. This means that when the filament burns out, the whole headlight has to come out and be replaced.
I was told that, just to make 100% sure, I should look very closely at the front of my headlights. If they were sealed beam units, they would say "sealed beam" at the bottom of the face. Nice and simple. They did indeed have this marking, but I also saw, in the centre of the headlight that the maker's name was not Lucas, as it should have been, but Wagner. Upon even closer inspection, I saw the very tiny words "USA LEFT DRIVE" on the face as well. My car is fitted with left hand drive USA spec headlights. This must be a relic of the time about ten years ago that the car spent a few years in Holland, where, of course, it was driven on the right hand side of the road. However, since getting back to the UK in 2003, this car has been running around for 9 years with wrong hand drive headlights, and not a single MOT station, including the one I have just been to, have managed to spot it. How bizarre. I will definitely have to change both the headlights. This is, however, not really a problem, as headlights for Minors seem to be always sold in pairs.
I then needed to decide whether I wanted to stick with sealed beam headlights, or upgrade to the halogens. I have decided to stay with sealed beams. You might say this is a stupid decision, since the halogens are brighter, and therefore safer. You would be completely right, but having driven for 10 months with sealed beam headlights which are meant for driving on the other side of the road, I haven't had any problems with seeing at night. Also, the front face of the halogen headlights is less convex (ie, flatter) than those of the sealed beams, which "bulge" more, and I much prefer the look. A new pair of sealed beam headlights also cost about half as much as a pair of halogen units.
Fortunately, I didn't have to buy them at all. A fellow young Moggy owner who happens to live in my city contacted me and said he had recently upgraded his car to halogen headlights, and so had a pair of perfectly functional sealed beam units that he didn't need, and so offered me them for free. What luck! I went round and picked them up from his flat the next day. I must remember to buy him a drink sometime.
I then started with the disassembly of the headlight surrounds. The first challenge was to remove the chrome outer ring that sits around the outside of the headlight. On my car, it also holds on the chrome headlight peaks that I had installed when I bought it. The first step is to remove one screw at the bottom, but on my car it was missing anyway. The next task was to actually get the ring off, and here I was stumped. There were no fasteners or obvious little things to work at to get the ring off. After searching on the internet with little success, I gave Stewart at Sussex Classics a ring, the person I'd bought the car from. I remembered that he had managed to remove the rings very quickly to install my headlight peaks. He told me that you basically had to push a flathead screwdriver in between the back of the ring and the rubber gasket that sits behind it and prise it off. After trying this for a few minutes, the ring reluctantly popped off, letting loose some alarming chunks of rust in the process.
With the ring off, I next had to tackle the components holding the headlight onto the car. The actual headlight unit is contained by a small metal bowl at the back, which screws onto an inner chrome ring that fits tightly around the edge of the headlight, holding the headlight into the bowl. The bowl itself is then secured using two adjuster screws and a hooked spring to an even larger bowl behind it, which is firmly screwed to the wing of the car. It was at this point I discovered how the previous owner had managed to use left hand drive headlights in Britain without being picked up the MOT man. He had simply adjusted the headlights to point over to the left, so the beam did not point into oncoming traffic. Quite resourceful really.
I undid the three screws holding the inner chrome ring onto the smaller bowl, and the headlight unit started to come out, exposing the wiring behind it. This simply attaches using a plastic connector to three metal contacts on the back of the headlamp. Remove the connector, and the headlight is free. Next, the spring holding the small bowl to the large bowl comes off, and then you twist the small bowl clockwise to break it free of the two adjuster screws. The adjuster screws themselves just unscrew from the larger bowl.
I could have then just re-installed the new headlight, but the larger bowl that holds it onto the car was in very poor shape.
The old headlamp bowl
The bowl is fastened onto the wing of the car with four screws, and behind it is a thick rubber gasket that prevents metal to metal contact, and also protects the adjustment screws from becoming rusty and jammed. But, as you can see in the picture above, a large part of the lip at the bottom of the bowl has completely rusted away. One of the four screws was in that area, and was therefore not holding the bowl on any more. I therefore decided that the bowl had to be replaced with a new one before I reassembled the headlight, which meant the old bowl had to come out. This meant taking out the four screws. These four screws are exposed to dirt and water being flung up from the wheel on the inside of the wing, and so are very prone to becoming jammed up with rust and muck, so I was prepared they may put up a fight.
The top two came out without putting up too much hassle, but the third one came out a few turns, and then refused to budge. It was the only screw still holding the bowl on, as all the metal around the fourth screw had rusted away, and seeing as the bowl was scrap now anyway, I just mangled the bowl off over it. The wiring for the headlight comes into the back of the bowl through a tiny hole, far too small to allow the plastic connector to pass through. Instead you have to undo the three wires from inside the engine bay, where they are connected using tiny bullet connectors. The connectors then slide out through a hole on the inner wing, which then allows the headlamp bowl and the wiring to come free from the car.
Unfortunately, progress then ground to a halt, as I was at a loss for ideas on how to get the stubborn screw free from the car. I discussed it with my friend Rob, who is a structural engineer and likes mucking about with tools and things. We concluded that perhaps the best way to remove the screw was to use a hacksaw to cut off the protruding length of it, and then use a high speed steel drill bit to drill through the length of the screw, causing it to collapse. Unfortunately, the only drill we had available was Rob's Stanley hand drill, so it would be slow going. I bought a hacksaw and some drill bits from B&Q, and Rob came round one afternoon and we set to work.
After Rob had experimented with screwdrivers and pliers, to no avail, we were about to resort to the drill, when Rob struck a brainwave. If we were to hacksaw off the top of the screw, as planned, he could then grab the shaft of the screw inside the wing with a pair of my beefy pliers and twist it out backwards. After taking it in turns and a lot of struggling, this eventually worked. We then released the final screw using a similar tactic, but this time we were able to plier it out from the front without resorting to the hacksaw. This finally released the old rubber gasket from the car, the last part of the headlight assembly remaining.
All six parts of the headlight assembly, in the order they come off
We then went inside to extract the headlight wiring from the old headlight bowl. It was held onto the small hole in the bowl that it passes through by a thick rubber grommet. However, over the years the rubber had become rock solid, and clearly it couldn't be saved. We had to cut it off carefully with the hacksaw.
By this time, the replacement parts I'd ordered from ESM Minor Spares had arrived. One shiny new metal headlight bowl, a new rubber gasket, some new screws to replace all the mangled and rusty ones, and a couple of odds and sods. There are also plastic headlight bowls available, which obviously do not rust, but I chose a metal replacement as it is both more original, and tougher; at least until it rots away. We managed to find a packet of rubber half-inch blanking grommets in a local motor factors, and after squeezing one into the wiring hole in the new headlight bowl, we used Rob's hand drill to make a small hole in it for the wiring, and slipped it through. I also had to remove the two locators for the adjuster screws from the old bowl and install them on the new one.
The new headlight bowl, with wiring installed
That is where the headlight replacement stands at the moment. Reassembly should be fairly straightforward, but work has so far not given me a free moment of daylight in which to do it so far. Hopefully I will get a chance to reassemble it soon.
