1985-1998 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
You didn't say what model of Saab you have, which is always extremely helpful in answering any question, but assuming that you have a model which always has its parking lights on, which would explain what you observed, or maybe you had the parking lights on anyway, here goes: each brake light bulb is actually dual function and contains two filaments - a lighter weight filament for the parking light, and a heavier filament for the brake light. This makes the brake light brighter. So, first check to make sure the bulb has two filaments. Check the bulb number (written on the copper base of the bulb) and compare it to what it shown for that bulb in the owner's manual. If you have the correct bulb, you'll see that there's a tiny post sticking out the side of the copper base of the bulb. Looking at the bulb receptacle, you'll see that the bulb must have a specific orientation for the post to fit into the receptacle properly. There should be two contacts on the bottom of the bulb's base - one for each filament, and the copper base is the ground, which is shared between the two filaments. Once you stick the bulb in, it rotates almost 90 degrees to reach its final position, at which point the contact for each of those two filaments will be touching the appropriate contact in the receptacle. Like the other posters to your question, I suspect that the bulb was installed incorrectly, so that the brake light filament was lighting up with power from the parking light terminal in the receptacle. When you step on the brake, the parking light filament lights up as well, but it's so dim, compared to the brake light, that you won't see the bulb brighten when this happens. The cop was looking for the bulb to brighten when you braked, and when it didn't, he assumed that the brake light was burned out. He didn't notice that it was brighter to begin with.
posted by 70.226.16...
, Sun, 5 Apr 2009 08:30:07
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