Well, over the past couple of days, I've been messing around with my car, since it still has a few problems that I might be able to figure out on my own. The main problem affecting the legality of my car right now is the lack of running lights. First things first, I checked to see how the bulbs in the brake lights were doing. Go figure- all three of them were busted. For those who haven't really taken a good look at your lightbulbs, I'll tell you what you're missing. There are two filaments to a brake light bulb, one that is a single strand, and one that is curled up tightly. The straight one provides less resistance, and is what glows when you switch on your running lights, then gets overpowered by the curly one when you hit your brakes. When I press the brakes, I still get light, but the running lights don't come on.

After replacing the bulbs and reinstalling my tails, I dove into the fuseboxes to check all of the fuses related to lighting. Small lights, turn signals, lighting relays... everything seemed to be in working order, but still no light coming from the rear! Frustrated, we started poking around the wiring a bit more, bouncing ideas around for possibilities. One that we came up with was that since I am missing a front corner light, and Honda likes to link all of their electronics in series instead of parallel, meaning that in the case of taillights, if one bulb goes out, all the rest of them go out as well. Thinking about this, we figured that the missing front bulb could be canceling out the circuit for the running lights, making it so that power couldn't reach the proper wires and get to the lights. The second idea is that the headlight stalk itself could be malfunctioning at the running lights setting, which would mean that power wouldn't even be trying to reach the lights, whether or not it actually could make it. The last option would be that during the crash that started this whole mess, some of the wires that spiderweb out to the running lights may have been damaged, causing the whole thing to stop working.

On a side note, though possibly related, the internal gauge clusters are refusing to light up as well, which makes me believe more thoroughly that it is probably faulty wiring, rather than a problem with the stalk or the missing bulb.

Either way, we are making the best of a bad situation and using the opportunity to learn more about my car... as well as ordering some flared fenders and a new body kit by Vision. Stay tuned for more, tuners!