Waste of a weekend!

On my way to halfords to buy a new cd player today im driving along and i can smell electrical burning smell..i pull over and discover my cd player is smoking,i quickly rip it out and all the wires behind it are sparking.
Because of that nothing is now working. I have no headlights because the wires are burnt out and also the dash light are not working either. The plugs that go onto the bulbs are all melted so im going to have to get new plugs and solder the new plugs etc..

All in all a waste of a weekend. And ive stil not got round to wiring in the cd player.

Started at 2pm and finished half hour ago! And ive not even got the dashboard back in or wired headlights,radio and sorted the dash lights!

Any suggestions?

give Emma and Tony a shout they are in bristol area and are breaking a van or two maybe able to get loads of the bits to just swap bits over.

make sure you find the original fault or it will happen again.
you've had a short in the wiring behind the CD player to cause the rest of the damage.

leopard_pagan wrote:make sure you find the original fault or it will happen again.
you've had a short in the wiring behind the CD player to cause the rest of the damage.

Ive managed to re-wire most of it now and theres just one problem..one headlight bulb is brighter than the other,ive tried 3 different bulbs on each side and its the passenger side which is the dimmer one. Ive had to buy new h4 headlight bulb holders which are wired in correctly and is still dim! Also my starter motor has gone tits up..wont start so ive taken it off,taken it apart and the armature is worn as well as the brushes inside! Could this be a problem why one is brighter than the other because of lack of power? But surely they should both be dim?

Need help with this as i cannot rectify the fault.

connect the earth side of the bulb direct to earth I had this prob with my car and it was a shitty earth it may have been a prob before and you hadn't noticed or the fire excentuated it.

rich the mechanic wrote:connect the earth side of the bulb direct to earth I had this prob with my car and it was a shitty earth it may have been a prob before and you hadn't noticed or the fire excentuated it.

The earth is in the headlight plug which is wired into the main loom i assume? So your saying take that wire off and earth that direct to the chassis?

use a length of wire and pull the bulb out of the plug very slightly so you can touch the wire straight to the bulb terminal and the other end to a good earth on the chassis this iwill then eliminate all the wiring and then if the bulb s up to full brightness then you can work your way along from the other side of the plug untill you lose full brightness then you have found problem. If a direct earth doen't fix it then you may be looking for a broken wire in the live feed which can be tracked in a similar way but is best done direct from the battery and you work back to the relay or fuse. hope this helps I'm a motorcycle mechanic by trade and tracing faults is second nature and I only think about it when the simple doesn't work.

rich the mechanic wrote:use a length of wire and pull the bulb out of the plug very slightly so you can touch the wire straight to the bulb terminal and the other end to a good earth on the chassis this iwill then eliminate all the wiring and then if the bulb s up to full brightness then you can work your way along from the other side of the plug untill you lose full brightness then you have found problem. If a direct earth doen't fix it then you may be looking for a broken wire in the live feed which can be tracked in a similar way but is best done direct from the battery and you work back to the relay or fuse. hope this helps I'm a motorcycle mechanic by trade and tracing faults is second nature and I only think about it when the simple doesn't work.

I found the problem,behind the fusebox is 2 relays,one for the left headlight bulb and one for the right headlightbulb! And above the relays are two seperate fuses which are also for each headlight bulb,i was unaware of this hence the problem but so glad i found the problem with it now,thanks for everyones help its muchly appreciated.

at least on a bike there is way less loom to find a fault in than a van...

Funny, before I logged in here I was writing a piece on our blog about the fact that Hijets don't seem to get many problems with starting motors, distributors and such. In fact, I've just put them on sale on Ebay with 20% off. If you still need one you'd be better off coming to us direct then we can do you a decent deal. agpeck@hotmail.com. Cheers Emma

emmabskin wrote:Funny, before I logged in here I was writing a piece on our blog about the fact that Hijets don't seem to get many problems with starting motors, distributors and such. In fact, I've just put them on sale on Ebay with 20% off. If you still need one you'd be better off coming to us direct then we can do you a decent deal. agpeck@hotmail.com. Cheers Emma

I had it repaired last week for 50 quid and starts first time,im so glad the starters are so easy to take off on the hijets, im in desperate need of 2 mirrors though if you know of anything?

flea bay. where i got mine, or there is someone in sale section whos a breakers.

Hi, yep 20quid each agpeck@hotmail.com