FixBroke: Subaru auxiliary lighting

When I first removed the fog light covers from the Subaru I was disappointed to find no actual fog lights underneath. This, the first stage of auxiliary lighting upgrades, sets out to fix that.

Nothing under here:

Princess Auto can fix that! For a mere $15… Power Fist!

The first step is to remove the metal plates hidden behind the fog light covers, as they will serve as mounting locations for the new lights. Strangely, they are held on by two bolts and one plastic fastener shoved into a nut. The plastic fastener is in the bottom left hole, and is not easily removed.

I found the best way to remove it was to smash it through the hole and let it drop into the bumper. This is the offending piece, or at least what is left of it:

Thankfully (and oddly) there is a nut that this plastic fastener was secured into, but because there was no bolt in that nut the internal threads are completely rusted and unusable:

Chasing the threads with a tap fixes that, and a quick trip to my bolts bucket finds a suitable mate:

Some rough measuring and test fitting suggests this would be a good way to mount the lights. However, there is no access here for a nut and bolt to secure the bracket to the fog light plate. Solution? Welding!

Welding prep:

Not my prettiest welds ever, but I’m confident it’s not going anywhere:

A quick brushing of Tremclad enamel paint for rust protection (plus a day of watching paint dry):

…and on go the lights:

Job done, right? Well, not quite. You see, nobody has removed those fog light covers in 15 years, and when I took the bolts out that held them to the car they took the rusted threads out with them. When I tried to put the plastic covers back over these lights the bolts just turned in their holes, not doing their jobs of holding the covers to the car.

My normal fix for this would be to drill out the holes, tap for a bigger screw and be done with it, but that wouldn’t work here because of the extruded design of the bolt holes, shown in this badly-focused pic:

Also I really like the little thumb screws that attach the covers to the car, and I don’t want to replace them with regular bolts.

The easy solution would be to weld some nuts to the backs of the brackets, but I didn’t have any matching nuts and didn’t feel like hunting around town for some oddball metric size. I would just have to make my own nuts.

I started by grinding off the extrusions and cleaning the remaining threads with a tap:

Then I found a piece of scrap steel, poked some holes in it, and threaded them with the same tap:

I then ground them into angles with my angle grinder (what else would an angle grinder be for?):

…and welded them to the fog light bracket. Note the bolt that was used to align the parts:

Now the bolts really had some threads to grab onto. Another coat of paint and these were ready to install.

In future updates, I’ll be mounting these big bad spot lights: