An illuminating experience

Being 22 years old, the GTOs headlights leave something to be desired.  Having owned a Japanese sports car in the past (an MR2) I had a spare set of H4 ultra bright headlight bulbs just kicking around in the shed going to waste.  So we figured it was a good idea to up-rate the lights.  Simple enough job.  On the MR2 it was just a few screws and a plastic cover, and you were job done...  not so with Mitsubishi....

A quick Google revealed that the process is somewhat more involved due to the way they designed the headlight system.  First you remove the bonnet plate (the bit you see when the lamps are retracted) then you remove all the plastic covering, then undo a few bolts, then reach around the back to unplug the power, THEN you pull the bulb out.

Still a fairly simple process.  Or it would be if ALL the bolts weren't rusted shut. I spent the better part of an hour wrangling the bolts on the left lamp before they started to budge, and even then it was hard going.

I got the cover off and got to the point of pulling the glass part out to get to the actual bulb.  The little brass screws are seized.  They WILL NOT budge.  At all.  In an effort to "circumvent the system" I even tried removing the whole light cluster.... no dice.

So I reassembled everything.  Maybe we will stick with the stock bulbs after all... lol

This does present the obvious issue that if a bulb goes while we are away we are pretty stuffed.  There is very little we can do about that now though.  And if I hadn't tried to change the bulb pre-emptively we would have been stuck struggling with it on the side of an autobahn.  Now we know to not even bother.

Some pics below of the nightmare.

The offending article (although the rig one wasn't any better)

Some of the many rusted bolts.  These were the ones i managed to free without sheering off.

The hole from whence it came.  Managed to get it all back in and aligned close enough.