How to Fix a Stuck Bulb Connector

Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!

We have the headlight out of the way so you can see what we're doing. But if you were trying to change your headlight bulbs and your headlights are stuck into the connectors, which happens pretty often, you can take some water displacement oil, just a light penetrating oil and you can spray it right in here.

It's not going to hurt anything because these get filled with dirt and grime and sometimes, you got to take them and push them into the connector and just kind of work it back and forth just a little bit, without even pushing the lock. And then now you can open the lock and try to separate them. You can hear the dirt in there. They'll get pretty slippery with the oil on them. But you can see it's starting to move and just kind of now open the lock. Just wiggle it back and forth and eventually, it should come loose.

Basically, there's a bunch of dirt that gets stuck in there and it makes the connection between here and here really tight to remove because there's also a weather seal in there. Otherwise, these are in good shape. Then you can just wipe down the oil. You can even spray more in there. It will help clean out some of the dirt and it won't really hurt anything as far as the electrical connectors. In fact, it'll help keep water and corrosion out of there.

If you've got access to it, you can used compressed air. Spray it in here to clean it out. Just face it away from you or you can use electrical contact cleaner to clean out of here. Get all the dirt out of there. I've switched to clean gloves.

I'm going to install the headlight bulb. Don't want to touch this with bare hands because of oil on your fingers. This is a very good example of why you should always wear gloves when you're changing headlight bulbs. Somebody probably installed this without wearing gloves, touched the bulb. The oil from your skin transfers to the glass of the bulb. It can then, when the bulb gets hot, the oil will boil just like if you were burning olive oil in a pan on a stove and it eventually, it will cause the glass to bubble like this and then eventually, it will break and ruin the bulb. So you should always wear gloves and never touch the glass with bare fingers.

A small bulb like a turn signal bulb doesn't get hot enough. You can tough it with bare fingers and install it. It's fine. Take our connectors. Plug it right in. It should slide right in nice and easy and click when it locks. Now you can replace your headlight bulbs.

Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.