My top passenger taillight has been giving me trouble for years and finally stopped working in which I discovered it was corroded. I bought a replacement socket/pigtail however it has 3 wires in lieu of 2 wires that the original set up has. How do I wire this and access to do work is restricted by what appearst to be a splash guard which I cannot access it seems unless rear bumper is lowered is this correct

 

OK, the original metal socket grounded through the socket body itself, thus only two wires were needed (one for stop/turn and one for tail lights). The replacement is plastic and needs the black wire for ground.

Your bigger problem is that the original sockets are swaged into the tail light housing. The replacement plastic socket is designed for snap-in applications and won't work without modifying the housing. Yes, you do need to drop the bumper to access the light housing.

 

So it looks like I will have to rout out or drill a bigger hole for it to snap into to correct

 

That's one option. You can also get a smaller, all metal socket that snaps in:



http://www.wiringproducts.com/contents/en-us/p2283.html

 

Alot of people dont know that you can push the wires out towards the back of the car so you can clean out all the grease and corrosion from the socket and lube up the spring so it holds the bulb correctly and makes good contact. This works with tail lights , backup , frnt turn signal housings.

 

It is not a splash guard it is a heat deflector , make sure you keep it in place or you will melt your lens.

 

Correct. The other thing is that the springs under the two contacts will corrode and break. You can cut them off and thread new springs on over the terminals.

 

I cleaned it out and still did not have good contact before buying new socket. Since then I damaged trying to remove since I thought it was screwed in instead of just being able to push out. If I get a socket from another cutlass and butt splice wire will that work?

 

If you do, be sure to splice the wires back far enough to facilitate maintenance in the future. If I recall, those wires are routed from the body through the trunk compartment so going far enough back with the splices in the trunk will make the initial job easier and future maintenance easier. If you can solder, I would recommend doing that instead and using heat shrink over the solder joint, much cleaner installation over all.

 

Each taillight housing has a connector to the rear body harness. You should not go any further than that.