[Healeys] Trafficators

[Stephen Hutchings]

I've just had my Trafficators apart again because the left hand signal didn’t seem to be maintaining contact. It’s working well now, but it is a fiendish little device, and getting the lever back in with all the appropriate springs in place is not easy…sort of like watch repair.

Anyway, I was looking at the original Lucas literature and it got me to wondering why we call it a “Trafficator”. Seems that the trafficators were the little flip-up semaphore signals made by Lucas, and usually paired with what they called the “self cancelling switch assembly”…which is what we Healey people now call a trafficator.

I guess, since they were originally paired, “trafficator” slips off the tongue more easily than "self cancelling switch assembly” !

Hoping I don’t have to take that thing apart again for a long time…

Stephen, BJ8