Brit cars/bikes are notorious for having bad electrical systems, particularly the grounds. My girlfriend wants to get a Vauxhall and we were thinking of ways to eliminate problems before they start. If we rewired the car with, say a Painless Wiring kit, and added a GM 1-wire alternator, would that solve most of the electrical problems? what else should we do?
yup.....Lucas electronics were notoriously bad, hence the jokes.... Lucas, the prince of darkness... Why do the brits drink warm beer???......Lucas refridgerators. Good luck with the rework....
British Electrics are notorious for one reason and one reason only,Home mechanics who don't know what they are doing.I run and always have run in many of my cars a lucas dynamo and regulator .they are cheap they hardly ever go wrong and when they do it's a roadside fix ............normally stuck brushes or dirty commutator.Wiring well that may be a little rotten so i will give you the rewire but as long as you use electrical grease on the contacts and connections you will not have a problem .I have also had lucas electrics on my British motorcycles and have not had any problems there.In-fact a lot of us hotrodders over here junk the American dynamo and regulator and use British ones as they are small neat reliable and cheap...........Prices well a rebuilt lucas 25 amp dynamo here is £20($40) and a brand new regulator to suit is £12($24)you can go wrong with prices and availability like that and yes i carry a spare generator and reg under my seat.they are the same generator and reg as i have carried with many of my cars and never had to use but if i get stuck say a bearing goes then i just get the tools out and change it in 15 mins and i'm off.Don't believe everything you hear don't forget before the japs the Brits were flooding the market and some people got a bit twitchy about it also many mechanics were inexperienced with Brit stuff and so a bad name was born,it's very easy to get a bad reputation but a lot harder to get a good one.............................Marq p.s any questions p.m me
Thanks Marq, but sorry, dynamo/generators here are $125 and regulators are $175 new... not sure where I could even find 1 rebuilt. GM alternators are $30 new. I see your point, but you are the FIRST person I've ever heard say anything positive about British electrics, including guys who live and breathe British motors. Given parts cost and availability here is so difficult, and I need a car that's reliable (girlfriend's car) I wanted to get rid of any problems before they started. She's a pretty handy mechanic, but doesn't want to get stuck stranded anywhere. That's why I wanted to know IF my plan would work or if there was a better alternative
i think if you rewire the entire car and use a 1 wire you should have no problems , except for the original gauges...are they electric or mechanical? if they are mechanical no big deal ....but if they are electric you will need to be concerned about positive or negative ground? 6 or 12 volt?
My old Victor ran stock running gear and original wiring the only electrical problem I had was the blowing exhaust flange (dislodgeg from earth to ground contact) filling the dynamo with soot, even then it was charging with the revs raised a little. Wiring was all in good condition. On another note my current Austin needed rewiring but even now runs all original lucas components including alternator.7 years and 30k miles on, no probs.
British cars don't have wiring, they have small plastic tubes with smoke in them that works things. Sort of like the smmoke that comes out of the exhaust pipe when the engine is working. Now, if the plastic tube cracks or a hole gets worn in it, the smoke gets out and then stuff doesn't work. I had a '57 TR-3 that the tail lights didn't work on when I got it. I unwrapped the loom in the trunk and found serving the two two filament bulbs in the two tail lights and the one one filament bulb in the license plate light, were NINE WIRES! (I have to add right here that I was doing this after Dad had come home from his company Xmas party with a fifth of Smirnoff and a quart of orange juice and we had polished off both drinking some serious screwdrivers right before I decided it was a good idea to rewire the lights....) Well, I knew that since all the lights were grounded to the body, I only needed one wire to light the running light filament of all three bulbs so I cut that nine wire harness off in one snip leaving just enough to splice to and then turned the headlights on and started brushing bare wires across the body till I found one that sparked. It didn't blow a fuse because Lucas doesn't bother with fuses, I guess they just considder each wire it's own "fuseable link"! When I found one that shot a spark I added wire to it to wire the three running lights in series, a third done now... Then I turned on the left turn signal and struck wires till one sparked and wired the left brake light filament with it, and the same with the right. Job done. and in about the same amount of time it took to need to "recycle" some of the screwdrivers. Now, If you try this method, don't do the ground on the body trick I did, it's dangerous, especially right next to a leaking gas tank like I found out later I had...Instead, use a test light. They look like a plastic handled ice pick with a light bulb in the handle and a wire with a roach clip hanging out the end, cheap enough at most parts stores...
I think some "Engineers" must get paid by the number of pieces in their designs. The more peices they use,the more they make. Rube Goldberg would be proud.
Now I just have to throw my 2 cents in, Restored my MGA about 15 years ago, using all original lucas stuff except the wiring was replaced with a cloth braided harness. I have had no electrical problems and even changed it to neg. ground. I am amazed too. but i got to be honest on this one, no electrical issues at all. I tend to think people screw up the electrics and blame Lucas.
this is all very interesting! Maybe Lucas should go on "Mythbusters"! are British electrics negative ground or positive ground? If I rewired the car with American stuff, would I have to get a new battery or switch posts or something?
It's like anything...when your not used to it, it's difficult. The guys who designed the RR Merlin engine, the Spitfire, the Mosquito night fighter/bomber, centimetric Radar, the Harrier VTOL aircraft etc etc can't be just a bunch of dummies when it comes to BASIC electrical systems. No way. Common sense just makes that thought unacceptable.
Lucas electrics don't suck, if they did such marques as Maserati and Rolls Royce wouldn't have used them. I know I was moaning about my '63 Capri not starting last week but I think it was a problem that any car could have had, the Pertronix fixed it. BTW all my cars now have a Pertronix system. I've owned my car since '87 and I've never replaced the generator but I had to rebuild the starter, it wasn't an electrical problem, it was the pinion. Even if the car's positive ground you can easily change it over simply by switching the battery posts and re-polarizing your generator, about the only thing that might not work, or work backwards is your amp guage and all you have to do is switch the wires on the back. Unless the wiring itself is shot there's no reason to go mucking up stuff, but I do believe that a one wire GM alternator is always a worthwhile mod. FWIW, KIP motors are really good but they are very expensive. I know from experience that they can get just about any mechanical part that commonly wears out. You can find other sources for parts, trim stuff and body parts are scarce as hell, even in England. Don't be scared of the car dude, but if the car turns to shit don't blame me either.
Not only will I blame you, but I'll take you for a ride in the Everglades. This is all very helpful, guys! Nads, was there a pertronix conversion for your Capri or was it a generic, one size fits all kind of deal? Any sources other than Kip?
My dad's MGB was about 10 years old when it started having massive electrical problems. No "home mechanics" ever touched the electrical system. It just failed becasue it sucks. The insulation cracked and fell off in great big chunks. contacts that were covered in elec grease still corroded. Also, official MG wiring diagrams did not match the wiring in the car. Also I think it's worth noting that the e brake handle came off in his hand one day when he was parking, and that the seat belt buckle recepticle broke apart into about 5 pieces when I strapped in one day. btw... The original altranator in my dodge lasted 20 years (but that was probably a fluke)
By the way Nads is right in that the only thing I had to do to convert to neg ground was switch the battery terminals and change the wire on the amp gage, I did flash the field coil to polerize (sp) the generator. i also made a tag that says ths car is wired neg. ground so in the future someone dosen't screw things up.
If it's new enough to have an electric tach I think you have to reverse the diode in it too, or it wants to register backwards like the ammeter.
You want to have electrical problems then try a Ferrari or Lambo,or even an Alfa. Scary stuff I assure you. btw I haven't heard Volvo P1800's wiring systems slated much, Lucas up to 69.
and just to put you straight from the earlier comment about us drinking warm beer.....If a barman over here served a warm beer he`d more than likely end up wearing it .....now that should be on mythbusters Monkey
Warm beer stems from the fact that traditional English Ale is pumped without a cooler, but remember, that Ale was kept in a cold damp cellar so although it wasn't cold enough to make your hand stick to the glass it was still palatable. Anyway unless I'm mistaken the first thing Aussie/US drinkers try in an English Pub is "Real Ale" so it can't be all bad. Personally I always drink ice cold Stella Artois. Thank You...um ha!!
ah, good old lucas electric. my norton chopper that is not on it's 3rd YEAR was so fun, and still needs work. I thought, ok, i'll get a boyer electric ignition, but i also want a battery eliminator. after going through 2 boyers (first one was shot, don't know why), buying a might max, so hundreds of dollars later, i start my norton, engine runs GREAT, i put it in gear, runs fine, then when i down shift and come to stop , the bike dies and can't run the headlight. NO CHARGING when you have boyer plus no battery i guess.
My 67 has Lucas in the body but Bosch under the hood. It's weird, twilight zone weird, that when you get close to tracing a Bosch wire thru the firewall to the Lucas side it just sort of blurs away and you can't trace it to save your soul. The book schematic is blurred there too. Curious, Eh what?
Lucas made ALL the wiring harnesses for ALL british cars for a long time AND unknown to many, the color codes were the same for every component on every car! Therefore, ALL black wires are ground, green wires with or without tracers were tail lights. Brown wires were charging circuit, etc. (worked on Brit. stuff for over 30 years!) If you'd like, I could probably find the article and publish it here - - ? Let me know.
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