John,
You have been VERY, VERY lucky. I pre-date you on British cars by a few years
and also have an electrical engineering background-and I have seen many, many
non-butchered Lucas failures. I am amazed that you have never had problems
with bad grounds- oh yes, you probably clean the grounds every year or six
months.... but how many people EVER had to clean the grounds on their Fords
(or VW's)???? I have had wheelbox failures with the wipers (NEVER happens on
a Chevy or VW). I could go on and on-basically the problems I have seen with
Lucas is that it fails at about 2-3X the rate of American or German (Bosch)
components. The trouble is that the American or Bosch components last until
the car is in the junkyard from rust and old age while the Lucas stuff fails
at 35-50K.
Consider how nice it must have been to own a VW and not only almost never
having to replace a starter or generator unless the car had 100,000+ miles on
it and never having to do any electrical maintenance other then changing the
points. Of course the Brits did not realize how bad they had it as they did
not have anything to compare Lucas to! The Americans had Autolite, Delco,
Prestolite etc and thus Jaguar advertised some years ago "Now with Bosch
electricals" proudly in their ads.
You might also carefully read "Lucas, the First 100 Years"-read between the
lines of this book (published by Lucas) and you begin to understand.
Jan
John Slade <edalsj@igs.net> wrote:
I have replied separately to Pete S, but must put in my dissenting remarks
about Lucas electrics. I have owned British cars since 1960, and have yet to
be let down by the Prince of Darkness, despite the reputation, and the many
stories told by others. I suppose it does help to be an electrical engineer
by
profession, but other than for basic routine maintenance to electrical
components, I don't spend extra time on electrics. It does help, however, to
understand the logic of electricity, which seems to escape some otherwise
very
bright people.
I have bought several cars which had electrical problems, in some cases
stated
by the previous owners, and most of the time have found out that a previous
owner or maintainer had "modified" the wiring in some way. In one case I
removed the complete harness, opened it up to remove and replace the various
hacked and modified/missing wiring, and replaced it to find that everything
worked correctly again. Jon's complaint about the dash light switch is
typical. In a correctly wired car, with the correct switches, what he says he
has never been able to do is a standard feature. Of course you can put on the
dash lights (and the parking lights) without putting on the headlights, that
is what the centre position of the lighting switch is for. In another car I
found that a PO had done some work on behind the dash components, but had
reconnected various wires incorrectly, with the result that some functions no
longer worked. I am occasionally asked to help a friend (any brand car) sort
out some electrical problem or other, and am amazed at how frequently I find
an absolute horror story of hacked and or dangerous wiring.
I firmly believe that most of the "difficult to resolve" electrical problems
we encounter with our Lucas equipped cars are the result of modifications of
one sort or another done by previous keen but not electrically savvy owners
(and occasionally garage help). Lucas design philosophy was consistently
conservative, but in keeping with most other manufacturers of the time. We
all know they provided the minimum number of fuses they could get away with,
and which by todays standards we consider to be inadequate. Nonetheless, with
a minimum of maintenance, we can ensure that these old systems conrtinue to
operate as they were designed to do. There are lots of problems caused by
component failure in older cars, but that is where more serious routine
maintenance comes in.
Just my 2 cents
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