Like many of you, I have taillights that seem to have less and less working LEDs. So after trying to heat up the light to open it at the seams (just ended up with a cracked lens), I decided to cut it open to see if the LEDs were able to be repaired. I already ended up buying a replacement on ebay anyway, so nothing to lose.





So here's where I started and my weapon of choice: Dremel w/ cutting blade.

Cutting lines:


You can see that the cuts are melting quite a bit of plastic. I think that's good. It means it will melt back together nicely (I think).







On this one, I've circled the one and only screw that will have to be removed in order to remove the housing. My thought was that by cutting where I would still have one screw, I can use that to help strengthen when I melt it all back together.



As I said, the cutter left plenty of spare plastic melted on. I intend to use a soldering iron to melt it all back together the same way we do when we remove intake resonators.



And here we are. All opened up and showing its guts.



And here's the rub. These lights are all connected via ribbon cables. The issue could be with the lights themselves or the cables, or even the contoller card. My assessment is that if you want to fix it, you probably have to replace the light string with something nearly exactly the same. The lights are red and have 2 different brightness. The wiring seems simple coming in, but you'd have to do some soldering to replace them coming out.

Eventually maybe I'll pick this up again and look around for some 2 stage LEDs that may work. Problem is that if they don't show the exact same color and brightness, I'd have to open both sides to make them uniform. I'm going to have to think about that and whether it's worth doing.