A new day brings fresh eyes to a project and my short circuit was immediately obvious. Both the license plate and the aluminum panel I cut were so far up inside the plate holder they were shorting out the circuit between the metal bracket that holds the light bulb and the copper base plate that powers the bulb. I disassembled the unit, took out the plate I had cut and used the Dremel to cut out a large notch so the holder plate wouldn't touch the bulb contacts. Here's the notched plate holder.
Here you can see the notches I had cut in the contacts so that the license plate could go up as far as possible. I can't believe it didn't occur to me that I could short this circuit with the *metal* license plate.
So I figured I needed to insulate all this with some electrical tape. These were very small pieces of tape smooshed on with the smallest needle nose pliers I had.
And here are the lights working, two blown fuses later. That's not bad considering some have to keep disconnecting lights one by one and testing with a fuse to find a short.
Lastly, here's another old plate fitting in there nicely with the lights on. Incidentally, when this circuit shorted out, the running lights and the gauge lights were all not functioning.
No comments:
Post a Comment