Saturday, June 17, 2006

In which he releases some Magic Lucas Smoke

'Twas a matter of time, really, until the Prince of Darkness made his malevolent presence felt. One of Dame Zara's foglights has always been dodgy - tap it and it works; switch off, switch back on - doesn't work. Bad earth, thinks I. Pulled it apart once, cleaned off one of the contacts with some wet and dry. Worked for a bit - next time I switched it on, nothing.

So today, after finally giving the dusty old dear a good spongebath and vacuum, I took the ailing foglight light apart again, gave both contacts a good scratch with some coarse sandpaper until they were shiny, cleaned off the general grot, put the light back together, switched them on ...

One worked, the one I'd just cleaned up was dead.

Then came the smoke! Acrid, grey smoke billowing out of the 'fixed' light, from under the bonnet and from the left-hand wheelarch. Mild panic on my part, but I had the presence of mind to reach in and switch off the lights.

Heart going at about a million miles an hour, I gently popped the bonnet and, some wafts of smoke aside, no flames shot up to greet me and it seemed nothing had been seriously fritzed. Closer inspection showed that I'd burnt the original cloth insulation of the wires leading to the left-hand foglight to a crisp, and half-melted the heatshrink cover over both wires all the way back to the connector on the inside of the mudguard.

I disconnected the fried wires at both the connector and inside the light, taped their ends just to be double-sure, took the bulb out of the offending light, put it back together, and left well enough alone and came inside to drink wine and eat smelly cheese!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The lights are a pain, I'm going to physically solder mine up to the bulbs and put a small connector behind the light... once I've replaced the bakelite wires !

Dame Zara said...

Hi Kevin, welcome!

I agree - I think that an in-line fuse might be the goer. There is a company in Adelaide that makes halogen bulbs to fit all the old Lucas fittings: I'm thinking of ordering a few from him (foglights, brake lights, tail lights, etc) and upgrading the whole lot ... in the fullness of time!