How Do You Do

If you want you can buy a kit from suppliers like 2cvStuff (ECAS aren’t the ONLY place to shop you know…) . It includes instructions, two warning lamps (amber for indicators and blue for headlamp main beam), all the wiring and connectors and a small supplementary mounting panel. All well and good, but it costs about £15 and I knew that I could do it for £4 without the need to add an additional mounting panel. Read on and I’ll show you how.

Apologies to experienced “mécanique de voiture” but I’ve realised that there are plenty of tin snail lovers who automatically assume that automotive DIY is beyond them and I’ve written this with them in mind.

That’s right, a pair. I intend to connect a headlamp main beam warning lamp to my 2CV at a later stage, so it made sense to buy and install it at the same time for reasons which will later become obvious.

By the time that I took this picture I’d already taken the liberty of soldering on two suitable lengths (24”/ 60cm approx.) of wiring from my spares box and then insulating the joints and neatening the job by applying heat shrink tubing. You don’t have to do it this way, the simpler method would be to crimp on two insulated 5 amp (the red ones) female Lucas spade connectors to your stripped wire ends and slide them onto the male lamp terminals. You could then bind the wires together with electrical insulation tape to neaten them up.

If you don’t already own a selection of Lucas connectors and a crimping tool then toddle off and buy a set now. They’re only about a fiver or so (even at Halfrauds!) and when you need more terminals it’s often cheaper to buy the complete set again.

As for wiring, I could get all technical but the local motor spares shop will have exactly what you need if you tell them what you need it for. Don’t even bother trying to get it from Halfrauds as they don’t seem to sell anything that can’t be attached by a self-adhesive pad any more (perhaps I should have said “self unadhesive pad” as their stick-on go faster bits always drop off after a seemingly preset time).

By convention, you should use black wire (or coloured wire with a black stripe) only for earthing connections. I tend to grab a pocketful of wire every time I visit the car breakers yard along with assorted screws and fiddly bits. As long as I’m paying for other bits my preferred breakers yard tend to take a pragmatic view on this practice, but others may set those big dark oily Alsatians that all breakers yards seem to have on you instead.

The point of this photo is to remind you that you already have two lovely holes in your instrument panel just begging to hold something more useful than cheap ‘n nasty looking blanking plugs.

We start by undoing the four very obvious screws that hold the instrument panel to the car. On my car the panel has four rubber washers behind which the screws pass through and in my case one of them fell out.

Don’t panic if this happens, just put it aside with the panel screws and refit it later.

You should now be able to gently pull the panel forward a little. In my case it would only come far enough forward for me to get my fingers behind but that’s all I needed. I was then able to feel the back of the blanking plugs and tried pushing them out from behind but mine wouldn’t budge so I used a flat bladed screwdriver to prise them out from the front.

The holes were a little bit too small for the warning lamps to push into so I opened them up a bit using a grinding tool on my miniature Dremel drill. Apologies for the blurry picture, it’s difficult trying to hold the drill whilst operating the right-handed shutter button with my left hand…

A word of caution: there are wires behind here and you must be very careful NOT to damage them.

Do not ream out the hole using a drill bit but use either a grinding bit or use a round file by hand. Do it slowly and carefully and you shouldn’t have any problems. Although I didn’t do so it’s a good idea as well to disconnect the car battery earth wire beforehand and secure it so that it can’t spring back into contact with the battery terminal. Although I was very careful, the tool slipped a couple of times and damaged the paint on the instrument panel. As you’ll see in later pictures I applied a couple of layers of insulation tape the panel for the second hole for protection.

You can make out some of the damage here and can also see the enlarged hole compared to the original sized hole below.

Note the existing wiring immediately behind the lower hole which you will need to carefully push out of the way before reaming it out.

Here you can see where I’ve started reaming out the lower hole; as mentioned earlier I’ve applied insulation tape to protect the surface.

Next, the indicator warning lamp is inserted into the hole.

The design of this type of lamp means that once it’s pushed all the way in a couple of lightly sprung shoulders open out and hold the lamp in place.

I then did exactly the same with the main beam warning lamp.

Although I’m not going to connect this up yet in this article it does mean that I shouldn’t need to remove the instrument panel again and disturb the pre-existing wiring again.

As you can see in this picture I’ll need to touch in the paint that I damaged.

Use lots of insulation tape to protect the surface before reaming out the holes and this will be one job that you don’t have to do.

To finish this part of the job you need to gently push back the instrument panel to its original position, replace any of the rubber washers that fell off and refasten the screws.

Now for the fun bit: making it work.

The principle is simple; one of the wires goes to a suitable earthing point (i.e. a good metal to metal contact with the car body, the other goes to the indicator relay.

First reconnect your car battery. Put your hazard lights on and follow the sound. You’ll come to a silver can underneath the dashboard and above the steering column. If you touch it you’ll feel it working.

Note that there are three connections; one is marked “C” the other two are marked “+” and “-“ and on my car there is a red dot by the “C” connector and a green dot by the minus sign.

It’s the green dot terminal that we need and the easiest and safest way is to use another Lucas connector called a “piggyback”.

This is basically a standard female connector but folds back on itself at the end providing a male spade terminal as shown in the picture

Strip the end of the warning lamp supply wire and crimp on the piggyback. Now pull off the existing female connector from the indicator relay green terminal. Pull it via the connector, not the wire.

Now push on the female part of your piggyback onto the green terminal and reconnect the wire that you’ve just disconnected to the unused male part of the piggyback. You should effectively now have two wires sharing the same connector on the green terminal.

All that’s left now is the earth connection. Strip and crimp on an earthing connector to the remaining wire

Now you need to find a suitable earthing point. The most obvious one is the mounting point for the indicator relay.

If you use this simply loosen the bolt, slip the crimped earthing connector underneath and retighten it.

For my own reasons I decided to drill a small hole and secure the earth wire with a self tapping screw and washer.

In the pictures you can see there are two wires coming from my earthing point.

The main beam warning lamp will need to be earthed so I did it at the same time. I was happy enough to secure one wire beneath the indicator relay mounting but didn’t want to put two on there. I’m sure it would have been fine but I had my trusty Dremel and I like drilling holes…

The last job was to tidy up the wiring a little.

I used a couple of cable ties as pointed out by my sausage-like fingers. In the other picture you see the unused and unconnected (as yet) main beam warning lamp feed wire, which I simply tucked up out of the way.

I’ve worked out which wire to connect it to, but need to work out a neat route and a suitable connection point. I also plan to install a headlamp flasher switch so I hope to detail this in a future article.

Finally, the proof of the pudding! Here you can see the result of the hazard light switch being activated.

Whether the ignition is on or off both the hazard light warning lamp and the indicator warning lamp are both activated together. However if the indicator switch is activated alone with the ignition on, only the indicator warning lamp flashes. Voila! Your pride ‘n joy has just taken a small but significant step into the 21st century, and you’ve saved a few quid into the bargain.

Robert Clark 10.8.2006