How to Replace Headlight 1997-2005 Chevy Venture

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Hi I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1AAuto. I want to help you save time and money repairing or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20 plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly, that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video we are going to show you how to replace the headlights on this '99 Venture. Same is '97-'05 Venture also the Transport in Montana and Silhouette. You can see I'm flipping back and forth between before and after. You can see how much nice those lights look and obviously how much better they will shine for you. Now GM intended these to be able to be changed without tools, but you probably will need a pair of pliers and a screwdriver especially if your truck's from the rustbelt as ours is.

Headlight replacement, there's the easy way which is the way it should be, which if you have a southern vehicle, it's not rusty. Your headlights will probably come out easy. This is a northeastern vehicle. I've already taken it apart and when I try to take it apart, this is a thumbscrew right here that you should be able to undo which I can undo now easily. When I first took it apart, I couldn't get it apart. I'll show you both ways. First let's show you the way a headlight should come out. You remove this thumbscrew. All right and then you pull your parking light out. You let it hang or you can replace it. I recommend if you're going to put a new headlight on, might as well put a new parking light. You'd want to remove the bulbs.

If you're not going to replace your headlight or if you're not going to replace your parking light, there's a little clip that usually stays behind right here. That's really the only reason you'd have to use the screwdriver. Just push that clip. You just want to push that clip back through so you can grab it out the backside. Okay and then that clip again if you want to use your old parking light, that clip would just press right back on right there. Now again if everything comes apart correctly, you'll be able to remove these two thumbscrews on the top of your headlight. You can see they're not quite coming off exactly on this and the headlight comes up off.

Here's your headlight bulb. If you're just looking to change your headlight bulb, it's a lot easier to take it apart like this than having to take apart everything that's in here. You'd remove this and then if you're just going to change your headlight bulb, you untwist this ring, pull it off and then your headlight pulls out, put your new one in, put the ring back on then the ring goes over some slots here. We'll close up here. We just want to make sure that you get all the teeth through the ring and then basically press on it while you're turning it clockwise. Now let me put this back here real quick here because I want to show you what happens when you have a Northeastern Vehicle like this like a lot of you probably will. If you have Northeastern vehicle like this one, I couldn't get this thumbscrew up first. I tried with my pliers and that's how I broke off one of the ears and I just couldn't get the thing. I couldn't get a good enough leverage on it.
Okay, so what I end up doing is using my pliers and pulling up the headlight facets first and then after you do that, you can actually just you then pull the headlight up and you can pull everything out. You can pull the parking light, the assembly out. Then what I was able to do is used pliers. I turned this and I actually used pliers on the non-threaded end of this thumbscrew and that's how I was able to get it out.
With that said, what you're really looking to do is put on a nice new headlight from 1AAuto. You can see a lot nicer, a lot clearer. Basically just hook up the bolts, pop over the bolt if you have to. There are two tabs here that go down into little slots here. You put those down into there. Let it straight down since this vehicle, like I said if you have a southern vehicle you won't have a problem but this vehicle again from the northeast. The studs actually unscrewed from the car. I'm just going to use a couple generic coarse thread screws. You can pick it up something like this at a hardware store, no problem. Let me start that one in. Start this one in. Let it tighten a bit.

Okay, so with the headlight looking this nice, are we really going to want to put this old parking light back on there? I don't think so. I'd just recommend getting our set which includes the new parking light as well. Now we're going to put it in and there's two lineup tabs back here. You put it in, you can look back there and see them easily enough and you look down between the parking light and the headlight and you can see that other clip go in. Okay, it's nudged in. Now we grab my original thumb screw from the part. Start that in. Get that part two screws. We take our pliers up and we're all set.

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