Mister Quickie

all the other bulbs in the assembly work

any ideas ...

Paulyy

What did you do before they stopped working?

Toran

Also check for signs of a water leak or bulb corrosion.
Clean area, apply some dielectric grease to bulbs.

Jfrahm

Do your dash lights work?

flashx

Buy a test light or make one out of a piece of wire harness. Test to see if you have voltage to the bulb sockets. If not go to the fuse box and check for a burnt out fuse If you do have voltage to the socket then you either have a bad ground or bad socket

drive135mph

is there power at the connector? Also check the connections inside the tail light assembly, mine looked pretty good but was corroded when i removed the connector.

Mister Quickie

Every other light in the car works

The connection is corroded and water does get in there but all the connections are corroded and they work ... :-o

Tiger03447

Take the plastic top to a spray can..paint etc..fill it with apple cider vinegar..remove all the connectors on that one taillight and drop them into the vinegar..Tomorrow they will all be nice and shiney..add dialectric grease all over the connectors, plug in the bulbs and let that light up your life a little bit...hope this helps some..worked for me.

porscharu

Everything works right up until it doesn't. Those lights may still "work" but I can assure you they are dimmer than they should be.

Tiger03447

I presume from your last..that you get power feed right up until the wires connect to the bulbs. and then it quits? Good chance that corrosion has eaten away a lot of the copper wire back a bit from the connectors, and also perhaps that there is only 1 or 2 strands of the copper making contact. Sounds like it's time to clip off the connector, skin back the insulation, and re-wire the connector if it's clean. Then solder it using resin core solder..then heatshrink the joint.

Mister Quickie

Does it have to be apple cider vinegar or will any Home Depot multi purpose vinegar work? No problem going to get the former but if the latter works I'll save the trip

porscharu

White vinegar is fine (and probably better) it's just a 5% by volume of acetic acid. That's what does the work.

Mister Quickie

I did the vinegar and the contact leads are shiny now but the one for the taillight still doesn't work.

When I put the other bulbs against the metal housing and touch the bottom tip to the lead (eliminating the bulb sockets) they all light up (brake, reverse, blinker) but when I do it for the taillight it doesn't light and I used a couple different bulbs.

So it would appear that the wire going to the taillight is bad which is the worst case scenario since there's no way to tell where in the path from fusebox to back taillight it's bad.

I hope I'm wrong but if I'm not, are there any options aside from replacing the entire wire harness?

Tiger03447

Can you put a meter onto the wire? positive goes to the wire, negative to the chassis of the car. Do you get any voltage reading? What color is the wire? I think that the Germans use a brown wire for the ground. I'll have to check mine out. But if you are testing, say, a black wire, you should be getting voltage to it. If not, go back up the harness to a chassis plug and see if that is corroded or that you are getting current at that point. If so, you just need to re run a new wire, not the whole harness. That wire would run from the plug or wherever you get a current path, to the taillight. Hope this helps some..

Tiger03447

Is this a cruise light or a brake light? If it's the brake light, put a piece of wood between the seat and the brake pedal and slide the seat up until the wood depresses the pedal. The brake light should light up. I think that those are 2 filament bulbs, with both the brake and tail light enclosed in the same housing.