For all those who asked and were curious, the red bumper lenses DO come apart using the over method. I set the over to 250 and placed the lens on wax paper on a cookie sheet and in about 7 or 8 minutes, the seal was soft enough to pry apart. The only catch is that there are 4 tabs (2 on the bottom and 2 on the top) that need to be depressed before starting to pry. What I did is use a screwdriver when the lenses were nice and warm to pry the lens from the housing. After doing this for all four tabs, it takes some strength to pull the lens off. So, to answer some questions from earlier in this post, it can be done.
I did this mod a couple months ago using standard filament bulbs, but always wanted to replace the bulb with a led based bulb. I bought the Light Tower 2 bulb from a guy on ebay called jp warden, or something along these lines (for about $25 /pair). Even though the bulbs are supposed to be the same size as the 3157, I needed to enlarge the hole a little for the bulb to fit. I noticed that when enlarging the hole, the dremel did a good job of throwing the shavings back into the lens. I tried rinsing one out with water and it did get the black shavings out,but it was difficult to get all of the water out. I tried to use a heat gun to remove the condensation, but it wasn't working too well. The other lens I just tried to blow the shavings out using compressed air and I tried using a vacuum to suck them out but they were too stubborn and the relector inside was covered in black shavings. As a last resort, I tried to use the oven method to separate the lens and housing for cleaning and it worked! I cleaned out the housing and lenses and resealed them back with silicon to prevent water from finding its way back in.
Now there is a trick that I needed to do to get these bulbs (Light Tower 2) to work correctly. I'm not sure if this is normal of if the bulb is internally wired incorrectly, but you must use a diode on the tail light input to the bulb. Originally, the bulb would work fine with tail lights only and it would for fine with brake lights only, but when the tail lights were on and the brakes were hit, they would NOT get brighter. From what I found out, the stop current was feeding back through the tail input. By using the diode, you force the brake current to flow to ground and not back through the tail circuit. Make sense? I did some experimenting on a breadboard and determined that this was what was happening and the diode was the easiest/cheapest way to solve this problem.
If there are any questions or suggestions, feel free to post your thoughts.
Tom
