more electrical conundrums

I replaced the sealed beam headlamp that failed yesterday, did not have any in Halfords, neither did there suppliers, but another supplier had no problem.

However within a short while both the indicators and the stop lamps fail on me.

according to the wiring diagram they are on seperate feeds from seperate fuses and the indicators share a fuse with the windscreen wipers,

Well the wipers were working fine and all the fuses were ok.

I rigged up a temporary live feed (via an inline fuse for safetys sake) to the indicator flasher and lo and behold the brake light is fixed too.

Something very odd and non standard about the wiring, for I have no idea where the live for these items was originally coming from, however wherever it was, it has either come loose or broke.

Annoying when things are not the way they are supposed to be.

Larry Series 3 109 2.25 petrol

Reply to
Larry
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You'll probably find that someone has "modified" the system to "make it better"! The only sure cure is to go through the whole system folowing the cables until you find the fault - most likely an earth I guess. One to watch for is the earth attached to the bonnet slam pannel (assuning the wiring is similar to the UK spec vehicles). This earths half the front lights (I forget the details), and is often discarded as being useless - in fact if it is very important, using one of the many alternative earths in the front can produce some very strange effects due to setting up undesirable earth loops. I discovered this when changing a sealed beam unit just as you have and had to resort to unplugging everything in the front lights and putting them back one at a time until I discovered what was going on. Getting it sorted out cured all sorts of irritating problems (lights at different brightesses and that sort of thing) - worth doing if you are having problems in my book - but a real pain!

If you go down that route, it would also be worthwhile cleaning up all the Lucar terminals (the ones that look like bullet connectors) and checking they are tight ( a gentle squeeze with pliers helps here if they are loose). Get rid of any Scotchlocks you may find and replace them with proper bullet or blade terminals, also use them if a wire should pull out of its terminal.

Hope that helps,

Richard

Reply to
richard.watson

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