Jay,
I would say that you probably did not use your Sunbeam as a daily driver.
>From my 45 years of Rootes ownership and owning over 100 Rootes cars (plus
Nash Metropolitans, English Fords, etc.) I can say that I have experienced
many, many Lucas failures. I have bought new (and nearly new) Sunbeams and
many low and high mileage used ones. I have had distributors explode, coils
fail, ignition switches fail, starters fail, regulators "fail" (points
corrode), generators fail, alternators fail, wiring catch on fire because a
connector popped off and shorted. Some years ago at a high school reunion
about a half a dozen friends of mine and I compared automotive breakdowns and
failures and it appeared that I had had as many as all of them put together.
They were all gearheads and drove some pretty interesting cars.... but I was
the only British car person! Number two was a fellow who was into
Renaults!!!
Neither of my British collector cars has given me any trouble, but I do not
drive them every day like I did in the sixties and seventies.
Jan
Jay_Laifman@countrywide.com wrote:
Jan writes:
>Consider how nice it must have been to own a VW and
>not only almost never having to replace a starter or
>generator unless the car had 100,000+ miles on
>it and never having to do any electrical maintenance
>other then changing the points. Of course the Brits
>did not realize how bad they had it as they did
>not have anything to compare Lucas to! The Americans
>had Autolite, Delco, Prestolite etc and thus Jaguar
>advertised some years ago "Now with Bosch
>electricals" proudly in their ads.
I don't know if anyone else recalls, but a few years ago one of the German
companies was going to use Lucas! And, I have to say I think it was VW. I
could have some details wrong. But, I do recall laughing at the irony of
it at the time.
FWIW, in my 22 years of Sunbeam Alpine ownership, I have only had three
electrical problems, two of which were my own dang wiring fault. The third
was really only physical - as the bolt on the alternator broke, causing the
case to split at an angle. I ended up having to hold the thing together
with some rope so I could get home - but, home I did get.
That said, I'm still running a Japanese alternator now - as you will recall
from my recent posts on wiring the ammeter wrong.
Jay
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