Removing stuck cigarette lighter?

Pull. It's only a spring clip holding it in. Of course getting purchase on a recessed button might be tricky.

Tim

+1

There is little to go wrong with a cigarette lighter insert so if it isn't working then maybe the fuse has blown and the socket may not be of much use for the GPS until the fuse is replaced.

How old is the car? It's ages since I've seen one with a cigarette lighter in it. They usually call them power sockets these days.

Yes, that (apparently) is the issue.

With her not having easy access to 50 years worth of accumulated tools and me currently 100 miles away from her the only thing I thought of was the tips of a couple of table knives slid just down each side of the knob and levered outwards at the handles?

I can also understand her not wanting to damage anything further if she can do without.

Cheers, T i m

Good point. However, if it has blown the fuse what's to say it wouldn't blow another if she did manage to find the right one and replace it?

If could have an incorrect fuse rating (too low) fitted I guess?

Cheers, T i m

2001 I think.

Yeah, I think the (unused) lighter is still rolling around the ash tray on our 2004 Meriva.

And assuming they haven't already, I think it's about time they created a new universal / 12V 'power socket' that was a better design than the lighter socket. My old BMW motorbike has a slightly smaller 'lighter style' Bosch / Heller 12mm power connector that I think is also use on some (other ) agricultural equipment but that too isn't particularly 'nice'.

My favourite 12V connectors are the Anderson Powerpoles:

Self cleaning, easy to release the genderless pins, polarised, come in a good range of sizes so there is no need to overload or oversize for any particular application.

I often remove the array of plugs that often come with 12V devices and replace them with Powerpoles then stuff is even more interconnectable and durable.

In fact, that reminds me I still need to re-fit the loom that I originally made for the Sierra then ended up in the Rover, into the Meriva as that gave me a direct (fused) 12V supply in the cockpit on a 'flying lead' that was handy for all sorts of things.

Cheers, T i m

It can't be any badly damaged if it has somehow welded its guts together than to need totally replacing.

Can she not read a map? Oh, of course, they don't teach that nowadays. Ooops.

[...]

'They?' never did.

I can read maps. I started out in the early Sixties finding my way all over the country using 6d Esso maps, and graduated through to competing in highly navigational road rallies, requiring the plotting of eight digit grid refs, at a rate of perhaps six a minute. In the dark.

How do I find my way now? A sat-nav.

The level of help they provide now, with lane guidance and traffic updates, make them by far the easiest and safest way to travel to unknown areas.

Anyone who decries them has never properly used one.

Chris

Quite, *if*.

If it's just not ejected and so removed easy user access for removal, it may be easy to remove, once she's got the knob bit up a bit.

Cheers, T i m

And drive, no.

If she had a map with her I'm pretty sure she could read it ... or her daughter could (as ours did when she was my motorcycle pillion), before GPS's came along and made the whole process easier, safer, faster.

The only 'Ooops' in this case would be her being able to find somewhere selling a road atlas, assuming hers, the one she borrowed as a spare and the one on her phone don't help her get home. ;-)

I still buy those big yellow 'AA' atlas's they sell in petrol stations for £1.99 (or 99p when the new one is due out) and they normally remain in the boot, slowly getting destroyed and are completely unread by the time I replace them.

I will continue buying them though as *I* am old-skool and like to 'be prepared. I'm my case and in these days that would mean my Garmin GPS would have to fail, my phone GPS would have to fail, my portable / backup battery (that can charge the GPS or phone, assuming either went flat and couldn't be charged from the car) would have to fail and my ability to read the road signs or ask for directions would have to fail, before I bothered to dig the map out. ;-)

That said, I do like 'real' maps and think would find it impossible to throw away my little collection of OS Landranger maps away, even though most are probably out of day to some degree.

Whatever the outcome of her journey home, she would still need to get the lighter out to be able to use the socket in the future. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

You, me and billions of other travelers Chris. ;-)

Of course they are. However, 'most of us' grew up without them so could 'of course' could manage without, but that's the best it would be (for the reasons your site), manage, just like we could also manage without a washing machine or

Or never used a 'good' one?

My first GPS was a Garmin GPS III+ that didn't have any autonavigation but it did have an auto-scrolling map and could point towards a waypoint and so still a load better than a map, especially when riding solo on a motorbike, at night and in the rain! ;-)

Even when traveling a reasonable distance, the III+ gave me the direction (pointer) and the (line of sight) distance to the destination. So, if you were traveling from London to Brummy on the motorway you rarely referred to it. You might use it over the final few miles. However, if you chose a non-motorway route you often found yourself at a T junction where there were no real clues re which way you should turn because neither *village* mentioned on the signpost were places you had previously heard of or memorised re the route. However, the chances are the GPS pointer will be pointing in the right direction. ;-)

Now of course (as you say) it's so much better with actual photographs of landmarks and realtime traffic update.

Cheers, T i m

[...]

Me too.

I use Google maps to check the route to a new location before I set off, and street view for the last couple of junctions to get visual cues that might make spotting a junction tricky even with the sat-nav.

Chris

My dad was in the TA and there were always OS maps at home, and most of them are still in my loft. I learned to read them long before they cropped up in geography lessons at school. These days I use my TomTom to navigate, but always check the route beforehand against the paper maps or Google Maps, and make any changes if I want to take a particular road. As you said, Google Street View is very useful for seeing what an unfamiliar junction looks like.

;-)

I think it's much easier to get a good overview of a journey on a paper map, as long as it covers it in the right detail. The details of a journey of 10 miles that is only represented by 1cm of line on a map isn't likely to help that much and you can't zoom in and out easily on a paper map. ;-)

Check,

I might do that just for just the final destination (seeing what the building looks like from the road) but have done as you do where it looks like it could be easy to miss say a small access road etc.

Whilst I quite likes the 'planning' of a journey on my version of a paper roll, as a solution it really sucked when for whatever reason the journey / destination changed. Like, you are on the way to a new location and you need to deal with a road-works diversion or get a phone call, requiring you to fit a C between your A and B.

Cheers, T i m

I was given a TomTom but not really tried to use it in earnest but feel they are 'different' to the Garmin offerings (or were).

The guy who gave it to me was getting fed up with it and asked me what I had (a Garmin Nuvi) so got one of those. He (a retired gentleman) was genuinely enthusing on how much 'better' the Garmin was in use and to use, but that *could* have been either:

1) The Garmin was a newer model and a new TomTom could have been equally good ...

2) These things *are* different (UI) just as Windows is to OSX and some people fit / prefer one over the other.

Daughter used my Garmin and her friends similarly aged (if not slightly newer) TomTom and so too found the TomTom less 'useable'. In her case it was a combination of the UI (that could be partly down to familiarity (with the Garmins)) but more importantly, the routing itself.

I am regularly having to get up in the middle of the night to 're-direct' foreign artics from this dead-end onto their correct route and I make a point of seeing what make GPS they are using. It seems they are mostly TomToms (marketing?), a few Garmins and some I've not heard of but I'm wondering if some of these 'domestic' units lack the granularity of setting where you can set it to 'Lorry' to restrict access to narrow roads and low bridges etc?

It could be that the options are there but the operators don't know how to use them?

If I'm using my GPS whilst walking in unknown City I make sure I set it into 'Pedestrian mode' as they then allows me up one way streets etc. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

After we moved back here about 6 years ago, we would regularly hear the engines of lorries trying to make an impossible turn outside our front door, as that's "what the SatNav" said to do. It always a TomTom, never a Garmin. The process of getting the instructions revised was so protracted and deliberately obstructive that I vowed never to buy a TomTom.

[...].

TomTom outsell Garmin massively, so the results of your straw poll are unsurprising.

The HGV drivers or their employers are probably cheapskates, trying to use the wrong tool for the job. They should be using this:

Chris

The missus' Volvo has a few USB connectors front and back that can be used to feed it music files to play, and also as a charging power source. I suppose it's standard nowadays.