By Corky Guenther

It does, it seems, take a village. In this the day of computer controlled everything, there is a vanishing breed. These are the folks who actually know how anything works. Completely. Down to the last nut, bolt, cotter key, wire, fuse, motor and bulb. Please understand this is not a rant against technology. I made a comfortable living in a technology field. I also don’t perform maintenance tasks on our daily drivers. This is just an observation that as we and our LBCs age, there is a small and shrinking pool of people who can diagnose and service any of their ailments as they occur. It is left to us to find friends and acquaintances who can either assist us or recommend someone who can, when misfortune strikes, or if we need/want to upgrade our LBC. Maybe a group of friends, who combined, have the knowledge and requisite skills to accomplish a given task. Or to speed its accomplishment though a division of the task into subtasks assigned to different parties. Bored yet?

Such was the case recently, when David Diener wanted to add turn signals to his (inherited from his father) MGTD. You may remember an earlier article by Dean Sprague describing the turn signal system previously installed by his father’s friendly next door neighbor. A Tupperware container full of stuff in the tool box.

This time upon the advice of counsel, he was determined to do it correctly (or at least reasonably close and functionally correct). To that end he/we assembled a village: Dean, David Ahrendt, himself and me. He had ordered the major parts required (Relay unit and Dual filament Marker light bulb holder assemblies) and the intent was to reuse the previously installed switch and indicators (non-stock) mounted on the Dashboard).

David Denier and Dean started working on the chassis wiring, determining what was there from the previous effort and what could be salvaged, what new was needed and also what was needed to add the dual filament bulb holders to the front marker light housings. David Ahrendt & I set about determining if the existing switch and indicators could be reused and what would be required to add the multifunction relay and a flasher. Initially, the answer was that the switch would need to be replaced. It was obviously from some sort of multifunction application, adapted for use here and was non-functional. Fortunately, it was of a vintage that was not completely sealed and a liberal application of contact cleaner spray returned it to life. The indicators were a mystery left to be solved later. We plotted the location of the flasher and relay, both in the nominal factory positions, and the wiring necessary to interconnect the components. That accomplished, it was time for lunch and a trip to the parts store for a flasher.

After lunch, it was mostly a matter of running wires, crimping terminals and mounting the new components. Not complex tasks but time consuming. Taking most of the afternoon actually. The testing of the installation was a success and without incident. The indicators remained a mystery however as one of them is brighter than the other. We were afraid to try to remove them from the dash fearing that we would destroy them and so left them as is.

Thus the village (some might say of idiots) accomplished the task in one day when it would have taken at least two for any of us individually and then perhaps any one of us might not have been able to complete it unassisted.