Morris Minor Owners Club

I recently noticed that my front left hand side indicator was not working on my 1971 Traveller. The side light in however was working fine and the rear left inidcator was also ok.

I fitted a new bulb and it still wasn't working. The holder unit is original but I had recently picked up a new unit as a spare. I whipped out the old one and fitted the new one. Tested it and I got the same results. No inicator but side light was ok. The strange thing is that when I move the inicator stalk to inidcate left the bulb at the end of the inicator stalk flashes once and then doesn't flash anymore. I can hear the flasher unit in the engien bay go tick tock tick tock so it is 'flashing'. The right hand flasher works fine both front and rear. The car is wired negative earth.

Any ideas on what to test next ??

I am taking her on her first trip of the year to the Belper Steam Event in June (http://www.belpersteam.co.uk/), anybody else going ??

bad connectio some where, earth probably

Pound to a penny its an earth fault.

Whip the light off and check that everything is as it should be i.e no corrosion etc...

Can't remember exactly how the unit earths, but double check that it has a decent earth onto something....

The side lamp will still work because it finds an earth back through the flasher lamp - which has much lower resistance, but the reverse is not true! Almost certainly it's a bad earth. Check by making a temporary earth with a length of wire.

The fact that the warning light flashes once is an indication that an indicator bulb is not working. It requires the correct load on the flasher to operate the warning light, in your case 42W (21Wx2). Also check the connectors on the green/red wire between the indicator switch and the front left indicator

I've been a bit busy with the the kids etc etc for the last few days so I haven't had chance to play around.

I got auto spark guy to have a look and he found the problem very quickly. There was no power going to the inidicator even though I had done the connectors correctly. The wiring connector behind the dash had got power going out to both inidicators so there was a break in the wire going to the inidicator. The wiring loom is the original braided one which had been wrapped in pvc. Tracing the wire through all that was going to be a nightmare so he just ran a new wire to the inidcator and hey presto, it worked perfectly.

So I think at some point in the future a new wiring loom may be required but I'll leave it be for now.

Very very unlikely to be a failure 'inside' the wiring loom. It was probably a bad connection at one end or the other - and his 'new wire' has sorted that out - basically by remaking the connection. This now means you have a non-standard wire trailing about the car - probably cause problems some time in the future.

I had the exact same problem a couple of weeks back and using a multi meter and known good earth found there was no power getting to the indicator lamp, tracing back to the connector in the loom behind the dash there was power to this point so I renewed the length of wire to this indicator, connecting into the exsiting point in the loom.