I started thinking about applying some DC volts to the Europa to see if there where any wires that had smoke in them. You know how that goes; you hook up one end of the battery cable solidly to the battery and then gently brush the other cable against the other battery post. If there is a BIG arc like a welder, you back off and see what you have wired wrong. If there is little or no arc, you temporarily hook up the other terminal listen for a little POP as a fuse blows. If you hear nothing you then look around the car and under the clash to see if anything is glowing or smoking. If nothing is frying you proceed onwards by flipping switches to see what works and what doesn't. If progress is good, you proceed onwards to actually turning the ignition key! That last event usually takes several days of stupid wiring corrections to get to.
So since I had not yet purchased a new battery, I hiked down the alley and borrowed one of those portable jumper battery systems from Paul. Just a little dinky one, not the big one used to jump start dead cars at a used car lot (Yes, he has one of those too!). The charge indicator light on the dinky unit did not look promising but I hooked it up anyway. No arc and no smoke! But alas, no power either. Paul's jumper battery needed a jump. I plugged it into the wall and went onto some other business for a couple hours. Later on in the day I tried it again. This time there was no smoke and no big arc but the poor little battery only had enough juice to weakly tell me that the interior light switch was in the "on" position and the interior light worked. But the light kind of looked like the one bad eye of Arnold Swartzeneger as the Terminated Terminator in the Terminator movie as the light got dimmer and dimmer and finally went out. Hasta La Vista baby! Time to just go out and buy a new battery.
In playing with the power I noted that the ignition switch was not automatically returning to the on position from the start position. On my next trip out to the garage I got out the shop light to have a closer look. As I reached back under the dash and grasped where the wires go into the switch it all fell apart in my hands and little tiny parts and springs began tinkling down. (tinkling down is a technical term also known as Aw ****!) Onto the nice new carpet the little pieces fell. I grabbed a plastic cup and put everything in the container before they disappeared, and then took out my snips and cut off the tie wraps holding the wiring up tight and out of sight (baby, everything is not alright, up tight and out of sight!). Apparently when I had put everything together, I had pinched the tie wraps too tight with my tie wrap gun and it pulled the back of the ignition switch apart - rats!
I disassembled the steering column with the remaining ignition switch parts and brought everything out to the work bench to work on. I figured out how it all was supposed to go back together - one copper switch plate, 4 tiny little springs, a phenolic separator and one little steel ball, but I could not figure out how the return spring fit in there to make the switch retum to "On" from the "Start" position. I spent hours flipping it, squeezing it, twisting it, hooking it here and there. Nothing I tried would give me the right combination of assembly with a return spring action. Another frustrating moment where you want to chuck the whole thing across the room - Patience!
I talked to Paul and went looking through his spare Europa stuff up in his garage attic but could not find a switch. I then talked to Bill Greenwald who did have a spare and proper switch. Took it apart and cleaned it all up for me he did. Took my old one as a 100% trade-in too. What a great guy! I put the dash back together and did my little arc of the battery routine again. This time the interior light did not come on (popped a fuse it did) but two of the 7 dash lamps came on dimly. Just the two backlight lamps for the tach and the speedo, not the ones for the amp, oil, temp gauges - strange. I went to twist the panel switch which was supposed to control all those lights and found that as I turned the switch on, the two lights that were already on went off, and the other lights would go on. I felt like the music from the Twilight zone should be playing. Doo-dee-doo-doo, Doo-dee-doo-doo. It was doo-doo all right. More like welcome to the Lucas Zone! Doo-dee-doodoo, Doo-dee-doo-doo. Welcome to "The Lucas zone", a place where Physics and Electronic theories do not apply. Time to unhook the doo-doo battery from the goofy doo-doo lights, grab a doo-doo beer and call it a doo-doo night!
Next - Europa Euphoria, Part 27
