Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Don’t Jump To Conclusions

I seem to have the nasty habit of assuming the worst when I go to fix a problem with one of my cars. When a failure occurs, I identify the hardest part to replace and call it the culprit. No gas to the carbs; must be the fuel pump. NOPE, it’s vapor lock and now you need to replace a perfectly good fuel pump because you screwed it up needlessly messing with it. No blinkers; must be the switch. NOPE, it’s a bad ground connection and you just wasted an hour when all it should have taken was ten seconds of cleaning and reinstalling the socket.

Friday, on my commute home, I noticed that the dash lights didn’t come on when I turned on the headlights. Not having learned anything from my previous faulty diagnoses, my pessimistic self immediately decided that the headlight switch I’d installed the night before had failed. I was so frustrated that I’d done all that work putting in the replacement, only to have it almost immediately fail. Sunday afternoon, with my mind still convinced the switch was at fault, I dove into remove, repair, and reinstall of the headlight switch. The mechanism for controlling the dashlights is a potentiometer built into the face of the switch assembly. I figured the coil of tiny wire had broken, so after removing the switch from the dash, I tested the circuit in the switch to see if I was right. I wasn’t. Surprise, surprise – not. There was nothing wrong with the switch. Irr. Time to back up and check more basic things, like whether the brand-new lightbulbs were blown. They were. I popped in a replacement bulb and Lucy’s speedometer and gas gauge aren’t in the dark anymore. I decided to see how long the one bulb lasts before I go and install the second one. Now the switch may still have a problem because something caused those bulbs to blow. Time will tell.

Now did I learn anything from this latest escapade? Doubt it.

No comments:

Post a Comment