BRAKE! LED bulb replacement - a heads up

[brem]

For the general edification, the BRAKE! LED bulb replacement I installed four years ago bit it within the last week or so. After pulling the brakelight enclosure off and checking it out, I found that an eight-pin chip had actually fallen off the circuit board and was rattling around inside the enclosure. Failure was total - absolutely no function left. My best guess as to what caused it is that the two screws holding the circuit board down to the plate covering the circular entry hole had loosened over time, and once they loosened enough, the circuit board started bouncing around enough to break the solder holding the chip on the board. The instructions included with the thing didn't say anything about using loctite, but I suppose I should have regardless. Anyway, if anyone else has one of these things I would highly recommend checking it occasionally to make sure the screws aren't loosening. I'm pretty sure I can revive it by soldering the chip back on and then securing the screws, but for some indeterminate period I was riding around without any brake lights (thankfully only once at night), which made me a bit ill to discover.

I'll get some pics going when I've got the parts in front of me.

Brem

[Airman]

I've got one of those lights too, I'll have to take a look at it.

[brem]

Here's a pic of what broke.

[img]http://i46.tinypic.com/2zyg6x2.png[/img]

Ugh. Never been able to get this site to interpret tags. Here's the link:

http://tinypic.com/r/2zyg6x2/6

Not much else to add.