The weather's been crap, I've been crap, work has been busy, and the world has gone mental queueing for hours to buy any drop of petrol that's available, thanks to the media saying "there may be a possibility that few stocks will run low this winter" - so everybody immediately gets the next train home from work to take their car to fill it up, in case they decide to visit Auntie Elsie 10 miles away, despite the fact that they haven't seen her for 10 years and don't use the car for anything else... Anyway, as a result of all that, I haven't used the Chevy very much since I replaced the carb.
However - I did have a wee jaunt in it one evening, when it got dark as I was coming home. That was when I discovered that the dash lights don't work. Well, one of them does, but not when I dip the lights - I thin that's a bulb in the wrong place!
I also can't switch the interior light on. Methinks the switch is buggered... they have a resistor to dim the panel lights and that apparently gives up the ghost...
So today, I'm going to investigate! To get to the light switch, you have to take the instrument panel out. To get the instrument panel out, you have to take the gear change and indicator switch off the steering column, and to do that, you have to take the steering wheel off.
Let's start with the steering column. I've written about this before so no details this time, but basically you remove the centre bit from the horn ring, then unscrew the horn ring and note where all the springs and contacts behind it go. Then loosen the big nut in the middle but leave it on a couple of threads so that the steering wheel doesn't fly off when you pull on it, and remove your front teeth. Take off the nut, the wheel and the spring underneath it.
Then remove the lower steering cowl, under the column - it's held on with a single screw. Under that, there's a U-shaped bracket that's held on with 2 self-tappers - take that off as well.
The next step is to remove the indicators switch - it's held on with 3 screws under the mechanism - flick the switch one way to remove one
screw, then flick the other way to get the other 2 screws. Then I slide the switch off the column, and remove the wee 3-pronged plate from
the top of the gearshift, along with the felt washer and the wee locating cup.
Then knock the rollpin out of the gear lever, and remove the lever and the spring on the end, then slide the gear shifter off the end of the
column too.
Now we're ready to remove the instrument panel. Except no we aren't. As well as the 4 speed-tapper screws that you can see, there are two bolts with nuts on the back, just above the steering column, carefully placed where you can't see them. Or reach them.
The only way that I can see to get to those, is to remove the heater control panel under the dash. That has a cover plate that's held on with 4 self-tapping screws, and then the controls themselves are held on with aa fifth screw. With al of those removed, I can (just) push the controls forwards to the edge of the dash, to leave a hand-sized gap.
I can just reach the two nuts and unscrew them. While my hand is up there, I also disconnect the speedo cable from the back of the panel. The "book" says to do it after the panel is loose, but from previous experience, I don't think there's enough room.
Then disconnect this little bit of wire that connects the gear change mechanism to the little gear indicator needle in the speedo.
Then I remove the 4 screws that hold the instrument cluster in, and pull off the wires from the gas and temperature gauge - mine are already
pre-labelled from when I installed the windscreen wiper kit, but make sure you know where everything connects back!
Then remove all the bulbs,
noting the ones to the oil light, the generator light and the main beam light - the rest are for gauge illumination.
Finally, we can reach and remove the light switch! It's not exactly obvious how it comes out, but here's the routine:
First, pull the knob out so that the lights are on. Then reach under the centre of the switch, there's a wee button. If you can press that button
and pull the knob at the same time, the knob will pull out. That would leave the light on, so I put the knob back in without pressing the button,
to push the switch mechanism back to off.
The switch is held onto the dash by a screw-in bezel. I used a small wood drill as a screwdriver to remove the bezel - the central drill bit kept
it nicely in place. With the switch released from the dash, I pulled off the connector (it was very stiff!) and removed the switch.
Armed with a wiring diagram, a multimeter and a wee jump lead, I test the wiring on the car. If I bridge the connectors on the loom to the switch, the lights come on, and so do the instrument lights. If I earth the connector for the interior light, it comes on. Testing the switch connectors, those connections just aren't being made. It's that panel dimming resistor right enough.
I reach the internet for this switch, but I can't find it in the UK, only in the USofA. After a bit of comparison of price and shipping charges (both of which vary widely) I find that the cheapest combination is the company that I ordered the carburettor adapter plate from. So I order one!
So that gets me to here and there's nothing I can do now until it arrives!