A couple days ago my left turn signal started going haywire. It's not keeping the steady beat 1-2-1-2-1-2.....instead the timing is not consistent and most of the time it goes 1 (pause) 2-1 (pause) 2-1 (pause)...

It's an older '96 civic and it could just be dying on me I guess, but is there another explanation why it's doing this and how would it be fixed?

 

one or both of the bulb might be bad, is this happening for both sides?

 

only the left.

 

try moving the good bulb over to the other side, see if that fixes the problem on the left side. and just making sure these are regular bulbs and not LED bulbs, right?

 

yes, they're stock bulbs

 

it's not that old

 

The sockets in the back tend to get rusty and lose contact with the bulb. Or the ground wire loses contact with the steel shell of the socket due to rust. It's kind of a lousy design. I took all mine out and soldered the ground wires to the shell.

 

I'll try switching the bulbs, but something that leads me to believe it might not be the bulbs is that the light next to the odometer is doing it too. So I think it's coming from somewhere deeper than the bulb itself, somewhere that goes back further than what controls my inside turn light [not sure what you call that panel there with the meters].

 

The system is designed to blink faster than normal, or eratically if the total bulb current is not proper due to a failure of a bulb, etc. This is to warn the driver that something is wrong. All the remaining working bulbs including the one on the dash will blink at the faster rate. Turn the blinker on and walk around the car and you should see one of the bulbs not working.

Also the same flasher relay controls the blinking of both right and left turns. Since it is working properly for right turns it's not the flasher relay.

 

Is there any easy way to replace the bulb? Does it require taking off the fender?