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The lens from my left rear light of my '78 was warped badly, especially the white hump the sticjs out. I always thought this was perhaps caused by the heat of the lights, but why only the left side? After many years (I do have my moments but this one took some time) it suddenly occured to me that the heat from the exhaust may have played a role in that. Suppose the car has been riding a lot of slow traffic with a lot of stopping and standing in traffic jams (one sometimes wonders why we have a car at all, 1 hp will do nicely) the heat from the exhaust pumpkin will not blow away and rise to the area covered by the bumper shield. The heat shield above the pumpkin leaves quite a gap between the shield and the bumper so hot air can accumulate there. Could this have caused the warping of the lens? The picture shows the aluminium copy of the heat shield I made, which has the same dimensions as the totally rusted orginal one. Can I improve the shielding of heat by adding some heat shielding in the gap? Any ideas by others with warped rear left lenses?
Instinctively I would have thought the light cluster is far enough away from the exhaust, and the bumper would deform before the lights if the heat shield wasn’t doing its job. Maybe if your car was running in a garage close to a wall so the hot gasses could bounce back, it might have an effect. Was a too high wattage bulb installed at some point in its life?
A picture of your lens would help.
Personally, I do not think it is from exhaust heat. I think it is an improper bulb. Too much wattage or a halogen bulb, or physically the wrong size.
I've pulled off a couple of lenses that the inside part of the cover was melted...clearly getting too hot from the inside due to improper bulb.
-Jason
...might be interesting to others too. Here is my rear lens. It is clearly warped, supposedly caused by heat. Only the left lens was distorted this way. You can see that the lens extension has bulged. It barely fits the housing. The outer lens has distorted also. It has become more curved so that it doens't follow the curve of the housing any more.
09-03-2019, 05:01 PM
left rear light lense warped - heat from exhaust?
