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I know VRG3's going to call it rice... too bad, I guess I'm a ricer.

What You Need:
1/4" Drive Ratchet
1/4" Drive extension(I used 3")
5/16" socket(dont ask me why it's standard)
bigass flathead screwdriver + washcloth
scissors
Hair Dryer

to undo your tails, you gotta remove the vent panel thing, and undo 2 bolts


Unhook the wiring harness from the light, then pry it off, with the help of a flat head screwdriver wrapped in cloth(to not scratch the paint) and a hair dryer to heat up the sick black stuff, you may want to use scissors to cut the stretched out strands so they dont stick to the paint

the only rust i've found


whoa, see-through!


I swapped out my painted tails from the 91, I like what they look like with the silver car, more than I like the amber.

Tres Chic.

I like it.

I dig it!

It is rice. But with flavor

Nuts..lol.

To me, for now on I only consider something rice when it's offensive.

Saw a Festiva (or Fiesta - whatever the hell that thing si) today that had a Yugo GV turbo type hood scoop and and a wing likeaq Sierra Cosworth's upper wing but smaller off the back. Thing was - it looked damn good with aits monochromatic white scheme and no otherwise extra BS. Hell, he may've had a turbo in oit fo a ll I know. Bottm line is, I have trouble labelling it rice along with the, say, Saturn with the red painted wheel covers, fart muflfer and retarded graphics. If I'd seen this guy before rice came about I'd a thought it was pretty cool. You can't even have a joke car anymoer with these damn ricers as instad of the obvioulsy slow car looking funny most people assume today that you actually think its fast and are trying to prove something...instead of laughing with you, they laugh at you. Or worse, think its cool and that you're one of them.

Steve

Hrmmm... should i put up a how-to for the painted tails?

My blacked out markers I don't see as rice. They work and they look good too.

they are though

Meh, I ain't tryin to impress anyone buy myself. If the corner markers are the biggest problem people have with my car, I'm far from concerned

i hate seeing amber on the silver car... I want to black out my corners too... I'll probably make that a summer project.

Why not silver them out instead with a pair of Philips Silver Vision bulbs?

ermmm... markers... sorry...

I dont mind if it lights up amber, but i dont like to see it on a car with the lights off....

the lenses on the sidemarkers are amber, so something has to be done to cover that.

Something done for aesthetic purposes doesn't necessarily make it poor taste and functionless ("rice"). What about the 56-7 Corvette? The little scoops above the fenders are fake. Or the '63 split window, not just the split, but the fake hood vents on that, too. The Stinger is a design icon. I guess almost anything American from the fifties or sixties would be rice - tailfins? Fake scoops on the Shelby GT-350? I'd gladly drive any of those cars, but wouldn't be caught dead in an APC-ridden Honda.

And its not a difference between customs and OEM that legitimizes one and not the other. Look at some old Hot Rods - some are established automotive works of art while others are visual pollution (most new cars fall under the latter, but not all). Its somewhat subjective, but still should adhere to established design principles. Monochromatic is generally considered to be higher design as complexity is the mark of an amateur designer trying to cover up ill-proportioned work and not knowing when to say when. So I think adding simplicity as in any discipline is a noble endeavor. So one-color lights or blending gets my regards.

Steve

In my book, it's rice if you hurt your car's performance because of your sense of style. If you reduce your lights' capability to do their job, that's hurting performance.

So it's not that it's done just for aesthetics. It's that it favors the aesthetics over function.

but when you add simplicity and lose some of the function is it really better if it only looks better? That sounds ricey to me :\ I never said oem products couldn't be rice, infact I feel the total opposite. Lots of oem cars are pretty ricey look at the STi. anyway, no reason to argue over it here.

Design as a concept is about looks - if things were to be strictly functional they wouldn't sell well nor would they be as interesting. We could all be driving bubble cars that conform to a perfected aerodynamic shape, but who would want it? Does that make everything else rice as it has diminished function in comparison? This could even be expanded to encompass any sports car as its function is secondary to its looks and mostly academic performance stats.

"A technical creation is only perfect if it is perfect from the point of view of aesthetics" - Ettore Bugatti.

Not that some smoked lights make a car a Type 57 Atalante, but I feel like arguing tonight.

Steve

My lights still function fine. They're quite bright, and even though my turn signals are now red(god forbid!) they still function. It's not like i fail to notice vehicles with red turn signals, especially ones that dont light up unless they're activated, unlike... caddy tails or something.

They certainly still function, but they don't function as well. You're trying to argue that the difference doesn't matter, but it does; There's a reason red turn signals are forbidden in all jurisdictions enlightened about automotive lighting.

that would be nowhere in america, because i've seen many stock vehicles with red turn signals

Yes. The United States DOT specifies has stupidly bad lighting regs, and Canada permits DOT-spec lighting.

Are you actually arguing that red turn signals aren't worse than amber ones? Consider what you're saying.

I thought red was the in the light wavelength most quickly ID'd by the human eye (as opposed to blue which can be seen the greatest distance).

Steve

There's more to it than physiological issues.

It's fundamentally dumb to have a signalling system where you can have two semantically completely different signals represented by the same color and intensity, and using variation in the time domain (i.e. blinking) to differentiate between them, especially in a situation in which the signal cannot safely be given one's full attention.

In non-critical situations, like pretty much any situation where you have the time to consider consciously what you're seeing, pretty much any turn signal will do, even hand signals. The safety issue arises when there's a lot of traffic, or traffic is moving fast. You need to know whether the person in the next lane is slowing down or is planning on changing into your lane, for example, and an extra fraction of a second spent waiting to see if the light blinks or if the third brake light is illuminated (assuming it's even visible) is significant.

Additionally, it is well understood that human perception is predominantly sensitive to derivatives rather than absolute stimulus. There are many popular optical illusions to demonstrate this fact. Amber next to red has hugely higher saliency than red next to red.

Incidentally, I haven't actually read anything about which colors are most quickly recognized. If you have a link to any studies about it, Steve, I'd be very interested in reading about them. The only studies I've read compared retroreflective yellow or orange materials to non-retroreflective materials.

Short wavelengths can be seen from the furthest distances but are difficult to focus on and recover from. In automotive lighting, the distance thing isn't that important, since within reason you can design a lamp with a beam pattern and luminous flux to be seen from the necessary distances in any color.

Interesting. The color thing I learned in school. There was a class where they talked about the psychological and physical effects of colors and colored lights. I remember pink was supposed to be a soothing color (I personally hate the color so that must say something about my personality). I think red was supposed to make you feel hungry...

The things I mentioned about the lights were a few of the things I remember. They used the example of automtive lighting choices. Police might use blue so they can be seen from greatest distances and red on emergency to get you to move out of the way quickly and for taillights for the same reason and because it doesn't hurt nightvision. I can't remember the rest. I think the amber may've been to correlate with the convention of amber for caution on traffic lights, but I don't remember - I could just be making that part up. Green was just an 'open' color (usually used for security, but free to anyone) and I don't recall the eyes' reaction to it. I assume it would be somewhere in between. Red and blue were probably chosen as they lie to the opposite sides of the visible spectrum and so the drastic effect of those light colors could be best exploited by emergency personel.

Steve

A lot of the stuff they used to (and still sometimes do) teach in school about colors and psychology is actually based on studies with very small sample sizes... I can't comment directly on the stuff you learned since I don't know anything about the studies it's based on though.

The reason that blue is a good color for police cars doesn't really have much to do with visibility from a distance; they could always specify brighter lights to be seen from further if necessary.

Blues and greens are colors that should be used very, very sparingly in automotive lighting for several reasons:

Like I said above, it's hard to focus on. Your eyes' short-wavelength cones are actually not in the imaging plane of your retina; they're slightly offset. That means that your lens has to change focus to try to see the blue clearly. When that happens, the rest of the spectrum goes out of focus and gets blurry. Your visual system literally has to fight itself. That's the reason skiers sometimes wear goggles that block short wavelengths; it actually improves the contrast of the image you see.

Also, it's hard for the eye to recover from when it's dark. High-frequency light impairs night vision much more than low-frequency light. That causes glare and leaves you unable to properly see for a short period of time. That's why you use red gels on your flashlights when you go out hiking at night, and why at night Navy boats switch to red lights instead of the normal clear ones.

Finally, short wavelengths scatter greatly in our atmosphere. That sends light all over the place, causing even more glare. This is why the sky is blue and the sun is yellow on a sunny day; the sun emits white light, but the short wavelengths scatter and the long ones tend to go straight through.

So blue is appropriately left out of the usual lighting. Then, it makes sense to use it on emergency vehicles as they can be unique to those vehicles. Like I said, contrast is the name of the game when you want people to notice something. The novelty of blue lights gives you a much higher chance of noticing the police car, at the expense of causing high levels of glare and reducing everything else's visibility. Your suggestion that red and blue juxtaposed would stand out because of their mutual contrast also makes sense.

A forward-facing red light, just by convention, is a take-down light, which is an order to stop/yield. It could just as easily have been any other color (other than clear or amber, of course), as far as I can see. The exact rules vary jurisdiction to jurisdiction, though, but I believe in most places green is reserved for emergency medical vehicles. Amber, then, is the only color civilian vehicles can shine forwards as well as backwards, which is why tow trucks and maintenance vehicles use amber in their bubble-gum lights.