Brake Lights

[Guest]

Gents,
I have just noticed that both of my brake lights work fine when the lights aren't on.

But when the lights are on, the N/S brake light just stays red and doesn't glow when braking.

All the connectors seem to be on ok - any ideas?

[73stagman]

It will be a bad earth on one of the lamp connectors. It is breaking down with the extra current with the extra bulbs on. If you put the indicator on that side as well and see if any of the other lights blink or flash when you brake,,,, You will need an assistant unless you have a mirror you can back up too!

[GDPR]

Ian

Just check that someone hasn't absent-mindedly stuck a single filament bulb into the stop and tail holder on the NS.....

[stag-phil]

I remember a friend having a similar problem, he managed to insert the twin filament bulb into the holderbso that the lugs were in the wrong position. Took the bulb out, fitted it correctly and problem solved.

Might be worth a look first before checking the earths.

Phil

[Guest]

Cheers guys, I will have a look when the Spetember Rains stop!

[GDPR]

Cheers guys, I will have a lbook when the Spetember Rains stop!

So October it is then Ian.....

[Guest]

So October it is then Ian.....

Yep.....but which year Russ?!

I have had a quick look and the bulb is a twin filament, but I couldn't see any eathing points near the lights. Where would the Earth most likely be?

[GDPR]

From the bulb, through the little internal copper/bronze blade, and ultimately through the bulb holder "fingers" to the lamp body. I usually add an earth wire from the bulb holder straight to the lamp fixing bolt as the earth can be problematic....

Some holders have a tag that is an earth so easy to add a wire, some haven't and those ones rely pretty much on luck - you can try trapping an earth wire as you plug the holder in.

[73stagman]

I have just bought a set of new bulb holders. The quality is not great and the earth relies on a rather feeble contact between a copper strip and the clips which hold the holder in place on the main lamp unit. I have soldered a wire to the copper strip and brought the new wire through a spare opening in the rubber sleeve surrounding the bulb holder and subsequently will connect this new wire to the ground wire in the main loom. I also soldered the copper strip to the bulb holder clip
although this will become redundant it will add some rigidity to the feeble copper strip. Photos to follow soon. Will be installing this all tomorrow night with some luck and then we might even feed some power through the loom to check the set up!

[Guest]

Just got round to trying to resolve this issue. Someone had a look at the bulb holder and suggested I buy a new one which I did though Rimmers. Today I compared it to the current one and it's not the same. The orginal one has three connector prongs on the back, whilst the new on has just the two as you can see below.

IMAG0879.jpg

Checking Rimmers website, it does seem to be the one they show as Stop / Tail and not Indicator / Reverse so I guess it's the right one. However I didn't try to connect it up as I had no idea how. Any thoughts?

[Giles]

looks like it does not have a seperate earth connection and just earths through the body of the holder and lamp unit?

[73stagman]

Thats how my new ones were. I soldered a earth connection to the bulb holder

[Guest]

Just an update as I went to Tim (an electrical guru) today with the bulb holder I bought from Rimmers - as you remember it only has two connectors in contrast to the three on the original - to see if he could make it work.

He connected it up in various ways whilst out of the main light unit and got no joy at all. We thought trying it in the light unit itself might make a difference but the little blighter wouldn't fit nicely into it at all, and just wanted to pop itself back out. It also made no difference to getting it to work. I can't see what we would have been doing wrong in fitting it as we rotated it all different ways to fit through the lugs, so decided to look again at the existing holder -I mean how hard can it be to get a bulb holder to work?!?!

One of the female spade connectors wasn't especially tight so we crimped it up a bit and the prongs on the actual lamp didn't appear to have a good physical contact to the inside if the holder. Fitting a new bulb was an improvement but that still wasn't curing the problem.

Referring to the wiring colour identifier on the website Julian pointed us to recently, and applying logic to the actual wiring of the lamp Tim decided that the way it was wired was wrong. He swapped a couple of wires round (don't ask me which) and ...bingo...the unit worked correctly.

Fingers crossed it stays that way.

[aerosilver]

Sounds like a good result.

Bob.

[V Mad]

The new bulb holders I have tried are rubbish; I prefer to use old bulb holders that I have repaired by soldering the earth contact to the body and cleaning up all contacts with a Dremel wire brush.