900SAAB

900SAAB.com: Foglamp Restoration

I've been trying to get my stock lighting up to par. I presently have Valeo headlamps, Scantech E4 lenses and GE Nighthawk bulbs. These are okay, but the light level near the car isn't the best. My stock foglamps were heavily pitted after 175k miles, so I decided to give them some attention. I purchased a set of damaged foglamps on EBay for a small fee; these had damage to their housing, but the lenses and reflectors were in good condition. I decided to remove the lenses/reflectors from the EBay set and transplant them into my stock foglamps. Here are the replacement lenses, as purchased (note the missing/damaged housings):

To use these lenses, I ended up cutting the broken housings away using Wiss shears and then peeling off the adhesive and cleaning the lenses. At the same time, I popped out the reflectors and sat them aside.

Once I had the lenses, I needed to remove my foglamps; not a difficult process for the p-side, but I had to remove the SAI pump to get the D-side one out.

To remove the lenses from my foglamps, I laid them on a pillow and shot them with my BB gun. Quite effective!

Once the lenses were removed, I scraped out the adhesive using a small screwdriver. Lacquer thinner worked well to remove any residue from the original adhesive.

The old reflectors were quite degraded, so I used the reflectors from the damaged set. The damaged set also had Phillips bulbs, which were better than my Sylvania bulbs. Here is a comparison of the old and new reflectors:

To adhere the new lenses to the original bases, I used 3M's WindowWeld; this is a windshield adhesive. I figured it would work quite well:

Once the WindowWeld cured, I cut off any excess with a razor blade and cleaned any residue with Lacquer thinner. Here's a comparison of the restored foglamp and the original foglamp:

With the foglamps renewed, they were reinstalled and aimed. Here are the installed lamps:

And with the lights on:

This is the light pattern, taken trough the sunroof, in my driveway. The driveway slopes at a 5 degree angle to the garage door. This is at about 15 feet distance:

The difference in light output is astounding. If your foglamps are completely pitted (like mine) and you find a set with good lenses, by all means, swap them out!