Now to do something about those dazzling brake LEDs...

The previous owner was an elderly gentleman that seemed to be concerned about people noticing whether or not he was braking. Because of that, he added these two little LED clusters over the license plate which sparkled and dazzled drivers, alerting them to my Miata's presence.

I, however, do not want to dazzle drivers with LEDs. I want to remove the LEDs. So today was the last warm and sunny day we have in a while so I went about just that. I left my apartment with two flathead screwdrivers and two phillips screwdrivers, but I ended up not even needing that. Here's a shot I took after I had already started removing stuff, meant to show the "before" picture that I forgot to take.


You can more or less see what I was striving to remove, the wires were hidden really well before I got to them though. I started by emptying my trunk and removing the floor carpet and the battery cover, exposing the spare tire and removing all pieces of trim that was blocking the removal of the rear trim piece which is where the wires had disappeared behind. Then I went about removing the plastic fasteners holding that trim piece in place. I accidentally broke some of one of them, almost making it unusable! (it still fastened just fine though).


The one on the far right was my doing, the one thats highest up was the previous owner's doing. He figured out how they worked without breaking it as badly as me, haha. You need to pop the center part out just a bit which disengages the lock, and then you can pull the whole fastener out. After I removed all but the last two fasteners, I started prying the trim piece away, trying to see if i could see where the wires were headed. As I did that though, the wires pulled straight out and unplugged themselves from the back of the passenger-side brakelight.

Oops... sort of? Judging by the way the wires were wound together without the use of any tape, I assumed it was a plug-in port that had no risk of live shorting if I didn't go in there with some electrical tape of my own. So I let a good enough thing be and simple replaced the plastic fasteners on the trim that I had removed and put the trunk back together. Then all I did was unscrew the LED clusters from the license plate and replace the license plate screws and I was done!

That took alot less time than I had anticipated, so I went to the gym afterwards and had an overall very productive day (ending even now in productivity as I start the blog and fill out all the backlogged posts!)