LED'S

damn,

I was soo hoping that stories of the "bitch that are the fold down seats" were just rumours, but alas, with another postive sighting of the tales of woe, then it must be true.

still on the bright side, it'll be SWMBO who changes over the bulbs for me on the disco (still banned from doing ANYTHING)

wonder if I should tell her?

Si

That all depends whether you have a video camera handy, the process should really be posted online as a warning to others . The trim panel that covers the back of the cluster is airfix thin so you need to manouver it carefully while trying desperately not to split the vinyl off the panel which is stuck on with spit and prayer. Once off you realise there is no position of the seat which allows you to see the stop/tailamp holder or reach it unless you had a misspent adolesence changing bypass hoses on Mini's .Mine was very tight and needed gentle persuasion with waterpump pliers to free it off .The easy way was to take out the cluster, two (very stiff) thumb screws or in my case one - somebody evidently got pissed off and left the other off. Reinstalling is the reverse of the procedure ( sounds familiar eh? ) It all makes me wonder why I have now got scars on my right elbow. Derek No I do not have tourettes I own a land rover :-)

:-)) I bought a shedful of LEDs for the boat as it doesn't charge it's own batteries except by tiny solar panels. Flicking them all on at once produced no drop on the voltmeter but flicking the only filament bulb ( the one at the top of the mast - can't be a****d to climb up or drop the mast to change it ) produced a big jig on the voltmeter needle. Current draw must be zilch.

100,000 hours between failures should see off the average Disco too so changing to leds for the brake lights is a good idea, but prohibitively expensive for any bulb easy to get to. Don't forget - buy RED led's for brake lights not white ones.

TonyB

Derek uttered summat worrerz funny about:

a.f.l. & 101ers Unofficial October 2006

I seem to recall that the camp site mentions summat about Fishing too in it's site... You sort the Fish we'll sort the barbie ;-)

Lee

On or around Fri, 16 Jun 2006 20:01:27 GMT, "Derek" enlightened us thusly:

I rescued the posh ones from the minibus I'm going to be selling soon, and had intended to put 'em in the latest minibus, but I ran into an odd problem: ford have wired the front ones at least backwards: the pin is negative and the case positive. thus the LED ones don't work.

so I put 'em in the sierra instead, then spent a merry 20 minutes or so getting at the flasher unit to disable the bulb-failure "flash-like-a-maniac" feature. FWIW, to do this, you have to identify the chip in the unit, work out which pin is the bulb outage sensor and cut the circuit board track to that pin.

If you want to get really technical it may be possible to reset the bulb failure mode by changing a resistor, so that it can sense a failed LED unit

- the data sheet I had for one of the types (used in the 19FL units among others) explained how to set the bulb failure mode by choice of resistor.

you can remove them, you know...

A filament buld is virtually a short circuit at switch on, as it gets hot (PDQ) and produces light their resistance increases dramatically. Thus there is quite a switch on surge with a filament lamp leading to a voltmeter wiggle. LEDs don't have a switch on surge.