Euro front turn signal bucket position lamp socket contact, Original or hackety-hack hack...? Options

[chmillman]

One for the Euro guys - I know you are relatively few and far between - original spec US cars have full yellow front TS lenses, Euro cars have a small white (clear) portion at the bottom which is a "position lamp" - or parking light. Goes on with the taillights in the first position. Equipped with a 5W BA15s based bulb (R5W).



So, I was thinking of adapting these to become DRL's. I found a few LED's with a BA15s base which claim to have up to 500-600 lumens or more. Same 5 watt draw, but LEDs. So I pulled the lenses off in order to measure how much clearance there is between the bulb and the lens - it's about 10-12mm - the LED's are a bit longer than the standard bulbs, but should still fit. Then I pulled one of the bulbs out to just see what the socket looks like... tried to at least, the bulb would not budge. So I finally pulled out the whole little assembly (held on by 2 screws) and realised that the bulb base was just stuck in there by some oxidation. In getting the bulb loose, the bottom (center) contact came out. And it looks very odd.





To me this looks like something someone hacked together from two uninsulated spade connectors which then just got jammed into the slot. The funny thing is that both left and right sides have the same thing...

I went looking to see if there was a replacement part for the socket and the parts diagram doesn't show anything separate other than the bulb - which makes me feel that if a socket went bad, one had to basically replace the entire TS bucket. So maybe someone hacked the solution above together in order to avoid this - the buckets themselves are actually in pretty good condition.

I'm not at all fond of the current solution - if the contact attached to the wire falls out and contacts the bucket body, I'll have a short. So even if the DRL project doesn't work out, I am now wanting to replace the sockets. I may need to try to adapt something like the following:



However, there's not all that much depth there behind the base, maybe 30mm max. Have to get a couple and see if they might fit.

So basically the question I wanted to ask is - has anyone gone through the same thing with their Euro-spec TS buckets? TIA.