Enlightening electricals

A little more progress today as I started to attack the electrical Gremlins.

The non functional offside rear lamp was nothing more than a simple blown bulb, so an easy repair - well it would have been if Volkswagen hadn't put the washer bottle for the rear windscreen immediately behind the lamp cluster, making a 2 minute job far longer.

The offside number plate lamp also proved to be a simple bulb replacement, complicated by the fact that the screws holding the covers in place had rusted to the point where slots for the screwdriver no longer existed, the screws had to be carefully drilled out and replaced with new. As the nearside was similarly afflicted I did that at the same time to make future bulb replacement easier.

Next it was onto the troublesome front nearside indicator. Remaking the joint where contacts had corroded had failed to restore function. Running jump wires straight to the unit failed to illuminate so it was time to pull the unit out and check for any breaks in the wiring. The pictures show the damage. I'm not sure if it has overheated, rubbed away due to movement of the cable or been eaten by something, but about 3 inches of the earth cable and the outer sheaf were absent. That's rather a large gap for the electricity to jump, so a rewire was in order. With the repair crimped, soldered and wrapped in heat shrink continuity was restored, and the lamp refitted but it still failed to light up. The car comes from the era of LUCAS electrical systems (Loose, Usually Corroded Always Sparking!) so I was anticipating a rewire of the entire system, but working backwards up the circuit to fuse box with a test lamp I eventually traced the issue to a loose connection at the bulkhead. This restored itself with the tiniest of sparks and the indicator popped into life. Hurrah!

An appointment halts play for today leaving just the dashboard lights and the fog lamp tell tale to investigate.

As an interesting aside while testing everything I was only getting 10volts through the wiring instead of the expected 12 or 12.7 volts the brand new battery should have been putting out. It turns out the battery has only been charged to 10 volts in the factory. It's now on charge to get it to full health.