Friday, Dec 05, 2014 at 14:48
Pop - Yep, driving into pitch blackness at 110kmh will work, for sure!
You just won't even see what you hit! LOL
I can remember the old HQ Holdens had a multiple-bayonet firewall connector in the main wiring harness.
One half of the connector was on the engine side of the firewall and the other half was on the cabin side.
The halves were held together by a large single central bolt.
The connector was supposed to be fully sealed - but the sealant missed a full seal, on more than one HQ build.
If you were working in flood conditions, water and dirt would enter the connector and corrode the bayonets.
Of course, both high and low beam were amongst the bayonet connectors, and if either of these bayonets corroded, look out!
I can vividly recall hammering along a country hwy late at night, at warp speed, and having a car come the other way.
I dipped my lights, the other car zoomed past, and I kicked the dipswitch back onto high beam - and Holy Moly!! Everything went black!!
I can tell you this much - nothing gets the adrenalin pumping like barrelling into sudden pitch blackness at warp speed with no lights!!
I hung on the anchors and kicked the dipswitch again in desperation, and low beam came back on, much to my relief!
A little experimentation found that high beam had stopped working, as it wouldn't come on when the dipswitch was kicked, so I drove
home (very cautiously) on low beam.
Next, some multimeter work found the power wasn't getting through the firewall connector, so it was pulled apart - only to find some badly corroded bayonet connectors - with high beam connector the worst affected!
Some cleanup with a little weak acid treatment soon fixed the problem - but I was always wary of those HQ's from then on!
The later Holdens (from the HJ or HX from memory) dispensed with the connector and the wiring was one-piece all the way through, thus eliminating the problem.
Cheers, Ron.
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