12-10-17, 11:32 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-10-17, 11:34 AM by tommyardin.)
Had a stone fly up from another vehicle the other night and it broke the wing mirror indicator/blinker lamp lens, luckily it did no other damage just the plastic lens, paintwork unmarked. Mercedes wanted silly money for a replacement unit, I found a brand new Mercedes genuine part from a Mercedes dealer on eBay for £29.99, believe me that is a brilliant price I replaced the blinker light this morning, took about 1.5 hours and a bit of a faff doing it, removing the mirror glass was a bit of a problem as I did not want to end up breaking it, but good old YouTube to the rescue, its a doodle when you know how, if I ever have to do one again I will be able to do it in half the time now.
But and there is always a BUT, Merc say that the indicator is LED and if one of the LED's blow the whole unit needs to be changed (MOT Failure) the word that comes to mind is BULLSHIT. Before I fitted the new unit I thought I would connect it to a spare 12 volt motorcycle battery to ensure all LED's were working and of course they were, the funny thing was that they were working which ever polarity I connected them, LED's can only be conneted one way round to work as they are effectively a one way gate.
Anyhoo new unit fitted and all works a treat, indicator and heated mirror, Top job.
On the old broken unit I removed the non replaceable LED's only to find they are replaceable and in fact they are small orange standard type incandescent bulbs as show below where you can see the standard element inside the bulb.
MOT failure yes! replacement unit fitted by garage about £150, fit new bulb yourself 90 pence a a little time and help from YouTube.
But and there is always a BUT, Merc say that the indicator is LED and if one of the LED's blow the whole unit needs to be changed (MOT Failure) the word that comes to mind is BULLSHIT. Before I fitted the new unit I thought I would connect it to a spare 12 volt motorcycle battery to ensure all LED's were working and of course they were, the funny thing was that they were working which ever polarity I connected them, LED's can only be conneted one way round to work as they are effectively a one way gate.
Anyhoo new unit fitted and all works a treat, indicator and heated mirror, Top job.
On the old broken unit I removed the non replaceable LED's only to find they are replaceable and in fact they are small orange standard type incandescent bulbs as show below where you can see the standard element inside the bulb.
MOT failure yes! replacement unit fitted by garage about £150, fit new bulb yourself 90 pence a a little time and help from YouTube.