Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 14:23:38 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Harris <rdh24@CORNELL.EDU>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Robert Harris <rdh24@CORNELL.EDU>
Subject: holy smokes (melted the instrument circuit)
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
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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