well Tom just tonight i was working on my car out of necessity and i had uh
uh had a long age old problem of my bright lights not working uh this is the type of uh switch where you flip the the lever the turn signal on the column
yeah
and when i would uh put it in the bright light position the lights would go out completely
which is even worse than them just not getting bright
exactly
and i had presumed that it was the switch and uh this is uh an older car it's a seventy two MG
so i had to mail order the part uh which i had done and tonight i went out and uh at least hooked in the new part only to discover that that apparently is not the problem it's not in the switch because it does the same thing with the new switch
oh
so i'll be faced with having to return that product and uh hoping that uh you know that they will accept it although it's been removed from the box it's obviously not been really used
did did did you do the diagnosis or or was it just an assumption that that's probably the part that failed
uh i had
done what diagnosis i could primarily by looking at a wiring diagram that i did have of the car
uh-huh
and uh pretty much decided that that had to be the problem i talked to one mechanic about it and he suspected the switch also
uh but i've not you know i really don't know what the problem might be it it the other switch could be the main switch itself uh that turns the lights on or off which is on the dashboard
uh-huh
uh it might be tied into the equation somehow
but uh
yeah i know uh when working with the uh flashers
there is uh usually a a special fuse that operates the flashers do you have a separate fuse for your high beam as opposed to your low beam
i i don't know i should look at that i don't remember seeing one in the uh
in the the diagram but i'll have to go back and look at that
diagram
yeah i don't even know if my current cars have a separate fuse i know sometimes when you think there are uh
things running while they're at the same unit like the headlamp
uh-huh
you tend to think well there's one fuse operating the whole thing but sometimes the extra amperage that a high beam drives as opposed to a low beam requires uh the use of a of a maybe a higher fuse
yeah that's a good idea
so that's a possibility
what i've typically found when that uh companies are pretty good about accepting returns on products like that when they're not needed after all and i hope that that's the case this time
is this a a mail order parts house that specializes in in parts for uh old imports
right exactly it's out of uh Kansas
um
um so it's not J C Whitney or somebody like that
somewhere
no it's not i also got a piece of chrome for the the hood that they had indicated was the right part for this car but it is not either it's obviously doesn't quite fit
so it must be for a different year
so i'll have to try to return that as well
yeah have you found any uh uh reliable import service people in the metroplex
well i had one person that i used for years and years on this car because i've owned this car since it was new
and uh but it's over like in the Brook Hollow industrial district down on Stemmons and Inwood area
oh yeah
uh-huh
and i hadn't used him for some years and the last time i called him back it turned out that he had further specialized instead of uh all import cars he has narrowed it down to where he only works on uh German cars and
German cars i'm not sure that he works on much else at all but he doesn't work on British cars any more and gave me the name of somebody else to take a look at it
i'll be darned
so uh uh i may have to check with that person as it turns out that one that shop is near where i now work so i'll uh i should be able to take it in and check that part out
i've not had to to exchange any other parts recently uh
because they were defective now i've had had pretty good luck i just however did uh have to get a
a uh one of these jam box portable dual cassette players
uh repaired i'd purchased it at at Sam's and i had assumed that it had a ninety day warranty and i should have checked more carefully and done a better job of saving the receipt
uh-huh
because uh i didn't take it in right away and let a whole year go by uh some of the buttons didn't work right where you had to actually physically hold them down to get it to record or to play
and as it turned out it had a full year's warranty and i could have gotten it repaired for free but i had to take it in while it was in the shop i ended up finding the receipt that i thought had long since been lost
oh my goodness
uh but it didn't do me any good because i had i had missed the window by about a week or two so i didn't even i didn't really uh even bring it up when i went in to pick it up
oh no
but uh that's really my only experience in the past year where i've had to take a product back because of a defect
well ours wasn't within the last year i guess it's been within the last two years
Judy has an Oldsmobile that we bought new and it's one with the uh electronic ignition and the computer controlled mixer and uh
i don't know what else it all controls but the fuel mixture and cruise control and things of that sort
and we found that the uh uh we were having two problems it was
idling fast when you first started the engine to the point that we park on a hill under our car port and
when you first dropped it into geared it would immediately want to back up into the alley and knowing that you always had to keep your foot on the brake hard otherwise it would just wrench control away from you
good grief
and the other problem Judy would have is occasionally she would uh be driving along uh decelerating like coming to a stop sign but not yet stopped at the stop sign and the engine would just quit
uh-huh
so we took it back to the uh Oldsmobile place
and asked them to check it out and at first they thought it was just a matter of timing so they adjusted timing and the problem didn't go away so we ended up taking it back again
i don't know why they don't look at these things the first time around but the
second time around they looked at their uh recall service and their uh service reports from region or headquarters whatever and
and they had a description of the exact problem we were experiencing that apparently was a programming error in the uh computer control unit which fortunately they replaced under warranty because it was about a three hundred or three hundred and fifty dollar part
huh
my goodness
and uh so once they replaced it then the the car seemed to work fine
huh
for a considerable period of time and now it seems to be we don't we're not experiencing the stalling but we're still experiencing a very uneven
