One of the cool things about the Speedster is that it makes you really think about little stuff you've managed to ignore all your life.
Like headlight switches.
I've been driving for half a century and have owned various cars for fifteen, eighteen, twenty years and more, without ever having a headlight switch that needed attention. Until now.
From day one, my headlight switch has been wonky. Wonky in ways that have been recorded by others in the archives of this forum. The instrument light dimmer has always had two settings - full-on bright or flickering between off and too dim. As time wore on, it was more flicker than anything else. And the parking lights have come on almost as soon as the switch is touched - before the switch is pulled out to the first stop.
After a twilight cruise the other night, I went to turn the lights off and almost couldn't. With the switch pushed in, the lights would pop back on of their own free will. I reached under the dash to feel the back of the switch and learned you shouldn't do that. Unless you like putting your hand inside a waffle iron and closing the lid.
The doctor says the bandages can come off in about two weeks.
VS is sending me a replacement switch for which I'm grateful. But it will be the same as the one that branded its mark onto my palm. Made with the same craftsmanship and painstaking attention to detail. The Chinese seem to have a genius for reducing the production costs of the most reliable device to the point where it will fail. I'm glad they don't make number two pencils.
So, desperate to become a true Speedster owner, I set about making a good thing even better. There must be a simple way to fix this without Chinese parts. There is! You can get a German switch online for sixty bucks - yikes! Not the cowboy way.
After an hour upside down under my dash and another hour deciphering a helpful wiring diagram posted here by Gordon Nichols, I came to two conclusions:
- The wiring in my VS only vaguely resembles the original VW wiring
- Neither VW or VS have used proper headlight relays in their wiring
We may have a dimming relay to switch between high and low beams, but all of the current for the headlights is still run through the headlight switch.
Aha! That's it. That's why the friggin underweight, under-engineered headlight switch is getting so hot. I'll just rewire and go get a couple decent, made in the US, properly rated switches that can handle the headlight current. That current isn't really that high - about six amps for the old school sealed beam lamps that are standard issue on my car. Which is probably why VW left out headlight relays in the first place.
But if I use a simple toggle switch for the lights, how do I adjust the brightness of the instrument lights? Simple. While rewiring, I'll just add a separate 'pot' (potentiometer) for that. Just like in real cars.
Off to the downtown, full-quality, top-dollar electronics store that stocks genuine, made in the US (well, made in Canada, actually) bits and pieces. Rough calculations told me a 50-ohm pot should be about right. And the beefy thing was rated at two watts - which had to be enough to handle some tiny instrument bulbs.
Do you remember from your school days what you make when you assume?
Back at home. Patch in the new pot for test. Power on.
Ppppfffffttttt!
Never has ten bucks gone up in smoke so fast.
More calculations and meter readings tell me I'm going to need one mother of a pot to handle this load. Back to the store for the amateur electronics technician's last resort - power resistors. Twenty freakin watts worth of power resistors. More juggling and calculating and testing finds the right combination of bits to properly dim the lights and not cook the power resistors.
But, hokey smokes, who'd have thought the little dash lights could be the circuit that generates so much heat?
I'm starting to think that it's not the main switch contacts for the headlights that are burning out the cheesy Chinese switches but the lightweight pot they contain for dimming the instrument lights.
One of the cool things about the Speedster is that it makes you really think about little stuff you've managed to ignore all your life.
