Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Troubleshooting

One of several portals to another dimension in my van


It's either my heaven or my hell when something goes wrong with the electrical system in the van. You know a trip has really started when you are half naked in the van, a lightning storm is crashing down around you, you just worked 6 hours unloading hundreds of 145 lb Masonite doors for another cookie cutter multi-unit condo flesh factory being built in the 104 degree heat so that you feel like a Chimichanga that had been left on the buffet table too long, and neither your tail lights nor turn signals work. It's awful because unless it's the fuse or the bulb or some simple ground problem then it's guaranteed to cost you 10 hours of troubleshooting. This problem was literally a tour de force that required total dedication over two solid days and nights. And it required Oggy ingenuity the likes of which haven't been seen since I repaired a 40 year old neutral safety switch using copper flashing. This time I only had to rebuild the turn signal cam switch using hair pins and magic. The horn is the next project.

2 comments:

70' super said...

I'm probably repeating myself...a similar thing happened to all my blinkers....Was impossible to figure out what wire was what in that spagetti nightmare....I went to Wallchinamart...bought 4 orange colored bullet shaped trailer lights for $15 bucks...attached them to the existing screw located on outside blinker housing, direct wired to main battery, back in to the 2 blinker clicking things under my dash, then to a pair of toggle switches. For hazzard lights I turn on both toggle switched blinkers that are non-unison....makes look like d.p.w. van..

Oggy Bleacher said...

It took another day to figure this out and it's definitely the turn signal cam that I replaced in the winter. The tines don't match the contacts so all the circuits are interrupted if you turn left and also hit the brakes. No tail light on the right side because it's all relayed through the signal cam.

And the horn problem bothered me for years and I finally fixed it! The horn itself was failing but also the grounding bolt area wasn't good. So I replaced the horn with a used one from a St. Louis junk shop and relocated it so it blows the sound backward into the van. But it works and I can rest easy.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.