This one turned into a bit of a faff, so I thought I'd share...
My Mk5 GTi came with a smashed lens on the offside front foglight. The light still worked, but it looks rubbish and obviously lets in crud which might stop it from working or cause a short, so needed to be fixed.
The local motor factors wanted £45 for a replacement light (you can't buy just the lens or the front bit separately), but I dug around on eBay and found a pair of new replacements with bulbs for £30.
On arrival, they didn't look
quite new to me - a few flecks on the lens suggesting they'd spent at least some time on a car, but whatever.
Saturday morning, out on the drive with my trusty torx screwdrivers to fit, and it turns out the new units wouldn't just swap on in place of the old - the bulbs in the new units (sold specifically as fitting an Mk5 from my year!) are slightly different and the connectors on the car don't fit them.
First, I tried taking the broken lens off to see if I could just swap that part. The new unit's lens popped off nicely, but after scraping lots of the seal out of the old one I couldn't make the new lens fit there, so plan C...
If you undo the screw in the picture below (I used an allen key as the plastic screw head shredded quite quickly when I used the torx screwdrivers on it) you can unclip the front part of the housing including the lens.
Fortunately, this doesn't seem to have changed between the slightly different units, so the best part of an hour's faffing later, we have a result - new lenses and housings on the old units, all back on the car and working:
I changed the working side too as the new lens was much clearer than the 11 year old one on the car.
Final tip: when cleaning crud off the mirrored backing of a fog light, be very very gentle as the mirroring comes off if you're not.
