Tech Tip this week is from Leroy Nagata - Thanks Leroy
My turn signal indicators were not working. After messing around I found out
that I had a bad ground. Actually when I bought the car the indicators were
not working so maybe it was bad when I bought it. However only one side was
functioning. I tried to get a "universal" directional indicator relay unit at
the local auto parts store, but they told me to go to a stereo shop for the
kind or relay I was looking for. I went home and drilled out the spot welds on
the relay cover. Upon inspection I found that the relay points were not
accurately set (one was very low) so I carefully bend the points upwards (did
they do this kind of adjustments at the Lucas factory?). I put everything
back, and I still had only one side functioning. I took everything apart again
and I found one of the coil leads had been broken (looks like at the factory
when the cover for this unit was put on it broke the wire.....don't they test
these things at the factory?). Well that broken strand was about as thick as a
baby's hair, but I somehow managed to solder it (I used to fix the
instrumentation on Nuke subs so I do have some soldering background).
Putting everything back together I was extremely confident that I had it fixed.
And, Wow, it worked perfectly. Now all I had to do was install the relay on
the firewall making sure that the unit was grounded. After "expertly"
installing the relay, I gave it the final Op test....and it didn't work! What
had happened was that the terminals got grounded when I tightened the box down
(this unit was engineered to fail). I took everything apart again and
installed spacers between the firewall and the relay unit. Now it works as it
should.
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