Accessing the Celis LED's in the tail light cluster (Facelift E39 Touring)
NOTE: This article describes how to access the 4 LED's inside the trunk lid tail light cluster. Other than that it covers only one type of defect there might be with the LED's.
Remember: Attempt the following at your own risk! I'm not to be held responsible for anything you might break.
Ok, here's the story. One of the 4 Celis tail lights went out in my '02 BMW 520d Touring.
Replacing a bulb doesn't usually make for any kind of story, but since the engineers at BMW have come up with the idea of installing LED's in the tail light cluster the story gets a few twists.. Well, fixing the problem is still pretty easy if you buy what the BMW OEM spare parts dealer tells you. Remove the old tail light cluster, buy a new one from us, and plug it in. Yes, you heard right: The whole cluster. Easy? Yes, piece of cake, except for the fact that the new cluster comes at 138 Euros here in Finland (around USD 181). BMW will tell you that you can't replace the LED's or even access them in the cluster. I thought I could spend 181 bucks somewhere else, so I thought why not give it a shot trying to fix it myself. There's nothing to lose since the LED's in the cluster were dead anyway.
I was lucky enough to find a slightly battered cluster to play with for peanuts . I "dismantled" the cluster with a drill, screw driver and hand hammer :) and found out a way to access the LED's without completely destroying everything. There's no way to remove the see-through red plastic cover from the housing without cracking everything into pieces.
Here's how I opened up the cluster. This is exactly the area you need to remove. I used a soldering iron to cut through the plastic. I'm sure there are more sophisticated ways of doing it...
Surgical precision... maybe not.
Service hatch opened! The second I saw inside the thing I knew what was wrong: The wire feeding +12 volts had broken off from the PCB. I'm pretty sure this is the main reason why the Celis tail lights usually stop working. There are 4 LED's in the cluster and I'm pretty sure they can't all die at the same time. Unless the resistor on the PCB gives in that is...
The PCB's removed and the wire re-soldered. After soldering I reattached the cluster temporarily to the socket in the car to make sure the Celis started working again. It did. :)
Closing up the "service hatch". Again with the soldering iron. Not a showroom finish, but it's water-proof...
Reinstallation of cluster. Voilą! Spend your 181 bucks elsewhere! :-)
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