Paradise By The Dashboard Light

For as long as I had owned my Mountaineer I believed there to be one major designed flaw. You see, when I turned on the headlights the gauges on my dashboard telling my speed and RPMs were very bright, but the four dials which are off to the side were hard to read. The two closer to the center, letting me know water temperature and oil pressure, were a little easier to see but the two in the corners, indicating how much gas was in the tank and battery life, were almost impossible to see at night. The fact that the two center dials were so bright yet it was harder to read the other ones the further away from the center of the dashboard they got lead me to assume this meant there were just two bulbs behind the dashboard in an effort to save a little money. (Yes, kids, that is how old my car is - there are light bulbs in the dashboard.) Not only did I think this was an extremely cheap move by Ford, but it also seemed like poor planning because if you were ranking the dials in terms of their importance to the driver I think gas would go first and RPMs would be at the bottom of the draft. However, this is hardly the first time I have run into a company which did something which annoyed me in the name of production costs and it wasn't the kind of issue which was a deal-breaker. Plus, I could turn on the overhead light if I really needed to see how much gas I had left, so it was more an inconvenience than anything else and my car history has made me very willing to deal with inconveniences.

The only reason I am even talking about this is that a couple weeks ago the bulb behind my RPM needle burnt out. Now half the dashboard was out and at night I was really close to driving in the dark. While RPMs aren't something I usually worry about while driving, I did have some concerns that the remaining bulb was going to go at any second. I figured I had better get in there and change the bulbs before I was driving totally blind. Car light bulbs have always been one of those things which confuse me, because they are so inexpensive to buy and yet if you ask a mechanic to install them for you it's never a cheap job. That's why I usually try to do this kind of thing on my own, but opening up my dashboard is a hell of a lot more complicated than changing a taillight. Not quite sure how big of an undertaking this would be I turned to the site which is becoming my go-to place for how-to problems: YouTube. Now, I give YouTube a lot of crap based on the terrible people in comment section, but if you are looking for a step-by-step video to teach you how to do a project, it may be the best source on the internet. As I expected there was a video showing me exactly how to open up my dashboard to get to the bulbs and while it was not going to be an quick project, it wouldn't be terribly complicated either. What really caught by eye was the fact that in the video there were four light bulbs in the dashboard, not two.

Suddenly excited at the thought of being able to see every dial without having to turn on the dome light but trying not to get too far ahead of myself I started to take my dashboard apart. The guy who did the video made something very clear in his videos - Ford does not want you in this part of the car because you can mess with odometer, so they made it deliberately complicated. Going off the theory that cheaters are also usually lazy, Ford made it like a jigsaw puzzle and to get the section of the dashboard with the gauges out I would first have to remove three other panels first. The first section was the kickplate underneath the steering wheel. It looked like it was only held on by two screws, but I should have known better because it turned out there were two more screws hidden behind the hood release lever and you needed to be quite flexible to see where the screws were (told you, complicated). When I finally got that plate off I found a second, metal kickplate under the first one. Fortunately I was able to just loosen that one to get the third piece off and after a couple more screws I though I was finally at the point where I could get at the bulbs. Of course that wasn't the case, I was just one step closer and after working with the same sized screw for the entire time, Ford decided to throw a curveball at me and use the smallest screws I have ever seen. The only good news is that I was able to find a tool that would take them off and after an hour of twisting and turning I was finally looking at the inside of my dashboard.

The first thing I noticed is that there weren't two light bulbs like I had long suspected. In fact, there weren't even four like they had shown in the video - there were six. Also, it wasn't just that the one behind the RPM meter was out - four of them had burnt out (obviously a few of them had been out for years) and the other two weren't looking much better. Now, according to the video I had watched the only thing more important than not dropping any screws (because it is not like my fingers are nimble enough to get into tight spots after them) was replacing all the bulbs when you had the chance, because the last thing you wanted was install a new bulb, put the dashboard back together and have one of the bulbs you didn't replace burn out in a couple of weeks. So, I ran to the local auto-parts store and bought six new bulbs and snapped them all into place without incident. I then began the slow and methodical process of screwing all these panels back together and only came up one screw short, which I actually think was missing from another part and I used it there instead. All in all the project took me a little under two hours and I would say the act of actually replacing the light bulbs took 2 minutes of that total. I can now see why mechanics charge so much to do this and why many people are only too happy to pay them for it.

The biggest miscalculation I made was that I finished in the middle of a bright afternoon. While it certainly looked like everything was working as it should I couldn't really test it until the sun went down, which wasn't going to be for a couple of hours. The anticipation was killing me but I have to say turning on the lights and seeing the entire dashboard light up for the first time ever (for me anyway), it was certainly worth the effort. It's amazing how easily people can get used to something not working. But now that I know this is how it should have been for all these years I feel like kind of an idiot for letting it goes this long. I mean, of course Ford would have placed a light behind the gas gauge - any company which has a metal kickplate under a plastic one is not suddenly going to start getting cheap when it came to $1 light bulbs. If anything I owe them an apology because I had been cursing their designers for the last couple of years when I should have been disparaging the name of whichever company they outsourced their light bulbs to. This feeling is very reminiscent of a couple of years ago when I accidentally discovered I had been driving around a truck that had been equipped with a remote starter on it for three years. Still, I guess finding out I'm an idiot now is better than finding out I was an idiot after getting rid of the truck. Plus I didn't have to pay anyone for the privilege because the only thing worse than being wrong is finding out just how wrong you were by a stranger handing you a large bill.