Electricentricities

The reason Poms drink warm beer is because they have Lucas fridges.
Joseph Lucas.Prince of Darkness,somewhat comman slogan,particulary among owners of old British motorcycles.These and other such scurrilous soubrquets,some of which are quite unprintable,are from time to time heaped upon the shoulders of Joseph Lucas Limited of Birmingham.This is realy quite unfair and displays a a basic inability to comprehend the simple principles of a motor vehicles electrical system.
Forget all the nonsence about magnetic fields and the flow of electrons along a conductor,for it is just that,nonsence.A myth put about by auto electricians to support their lavish lifestyle at your expense.The reaity is smoke.When you think about it,it all becomes startlingly obvious-smoke makes all things electrical function.If the smoke escapes,the componant stops working.For example,the last time you had to grovel under your car to replace the starter motor,didnt it start smoking before it ceased working!Of course.
The wiring loom in your car carries smoke from one devise to another,pumped around the system by the dynamo,and when a wire springs a leak it lets out all the smoke and everything stops.The starter motor requires a lot of smoke to work properly,so it has a very thick wire going to it.
The battery stores up large quantities of smoke dissolved in the battery acid which is why they were once called accumulators,until it became apparent that we unwashed home mechanics would twig to the secret.Naturally if you try to dissolve to much smoke in your battery it will escape through those tiny holes in the top,this is why those new failed batteries with sealed tops explode when they get to much smoke in them.
But with regard to Joseph Lucas and his wrongfully sullied reputation-why is he so maligned!Why are Lucas componants more likely to leak smoke than,say Bosch or Morelli!Because Lucas is British and British things always leak.British sports cars leak rain,British hydrolysis units leak fluid,and the British Government leaks military secrets.So naturally British electrical componants leak smoke.
This is taken from a copy of The Lightshaft.

I remember being gobsmacked when a long-suffering Ducati owner I used to work with described his latest weekend spent fixing the bike up after a run, and ruefully observed that italian electrics are nowhere near as good as the English Lucas gear.

I think you will find the answer to that one is that Lucas had a captive and protected market in the UK, at least they did for a while anyway, when you have exclusive supply contracts with the likes of BMC and Ford UK who between them had much of the domestic market share and there is no competition from Ze Jurmanns why spend up large on R&D when you don't need to improve your product!

http://www.mez.co.uk/lucas.html

Shit I would never have copied that if I been given this.All a bit of fun.

Good stuff, but being serious for a minute.

Would I rather be doing wiring work on a Lucas(British Standard BS-AU7a 1983 - Colour Codes for Vehicle Wiring) wired car of Brit extraction or a Jap one with no colour codes.H'mmm, now let me think.

Although not quite up with the London Underground underground map as a design icon, I can wire up a car from scratch using the Lucas system with no problems at all.You KNOW that the green/purple wire is for the brake lights and you know that the earth wires are always black, the auxilary fused systems feed wires are green and so on.

With a little bit of extra thought, even wiring up a car from scratch isn't beyond the amateur and using redundant standard colours for your extras (oil temp gauge, extra fuel pump, fan over-rides etc) makes the whole job logical.

At least my 40 - 60 year old Lucas number-plate lamps haven't disintegrated into a pile of rust like the crap trailer lamps from Repco or Super Cheap either!

WIRING on a jappa! . HELL what about the plumbing! ;-(

Most of the older Pom cars can be driven on about 4 connected wires Including battery cables.
Try that with a modern jappa (petrol to be fair) but even then, the modern diesels are about as bad as the cars