Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 11:43:00 -0700
Reply-To: Gerald Masar <azsun99@EARTHLINK.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Gerald Masar <azsun99@EARTHLINK.NET>
Subject: Re: holy smokes (melted the instrument circuit)
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Sorry to hear of your Vanagon troubles (is that a double negative?).
#1. Always disconnect the battery ground.
#2. The blue hi-beam is a bulb with a blue cover, not an LED. Might still be able to
get one from dealer $$.
Good luck.
Jerry
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Harris" <rdh24@CORNELL.EDU>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Friday, May 06, 2005 11:23 AM
Subject: holy smokes (melted the instrument circuit)
> hi y'all,
> Back on the list after being unsubscribed since December... yeah theres a
> metric ton of email every day but I missed y'all! Never see any Vanagons
> around my town, they're a rare breed up here in the Northeast any
> more. Just about the first email I got was the thread about how if you
> park nose-up in the rain you get to hear a loud water drip from inside the
> left rear sail pillar all night long, long hours of wishing you had
> remembered to park the other way round -- I about fell out of my chair
> laughing -- another one of those quirks you think you were the only one to
> remark on, and it turns out everybody has had the same experience!!
>
> ANyway I was working on my 84 Westy last night and it turned into a classic
> Vanagon experience... the way a tiny 2 cent problem you think will take ten
> minutes to fix degrades into a Big Deal that takes hours... just had to
> share with you guys.
>
> So for a long time now my high beam indicator LED has not been
> working. After blinding many an oncoming driver, last night I finally
> decided to fix the thing. Took the dash cluster out, messed around w/ the
> multimeter and determined that the LED was burned up. Quick trip to Radio
> Shack, bought new LED, out with the old one and in with the new, all with a
> minimum of cursing and only one beer... so far so good. Went to reinstall
> the gauge cluster on the dashboard and suddenly one of the little
> incandescent instrument illumination lights that lights up the speedometer
> is on the fritz. It's dark and cold by now and I'm working by feel so I
> just kind of wiggle the bulb around in its socket hoping to make it get a
> good contact.
>
> That's when all the instruments lights flickered out and grey smoke started
> pouring off the mylar printed circuit sheet. Aaaack! Punched off the
> light switch to stop the juice, yanked the gauge cluster out again, and
> back to the workbench. Ahh, the heady aroma of burning German
> plastic. (usually followed shortly by the smell of burning MasterCard
> plastic) Turns out the printed copper contacts behind the bulbs are all
> starting to lift off the plastic sheet they were printed on, and when I
> wiggled the bulb one of the circuit tracks moved far enough to short out
> against a ground track. So the instrument light circuit track is now all
> melted, and the headlight switch rheostat is kaput. Not only that, I soon
> discovered that in my excitement to yank the instrument pod back off the
> dash, I tore part of the printed circuit sheet, disabling half of
> it! Aaaaack!
>
> Let's see.... in two carefree hours I have gone from having a perfectly
> functional dash cluster (w/ the exception of the hi beam LED) to having a
> dash cluster that is (a) melted, and (b) torn. Although in theory the hi
> beam indicator would work now. By midnight I was calm enough to go to bed,
> and early this morning before work I started painstakingly soldering in
> wires to bypass the damaged parts of the mylar circuit sheet. Will finish
> the job tonight, PROVIDED nothing else goes haywire in the process!
>
> Vanagons! Why do we love them!?
>
> Still keeping my cool in upstate NY,
> Robert H.
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