Saturday, 1 January 2011

Self Cancelling Indicators

When I first bought Tina, I wasn't sure if she had self cancelling indicators or not. Certainly if she did, then they didn't work. Turning the steering wheel with the car stationary, the engine off and listening carefully, I could just hear the sound of the indicators trying to cancel so I had to investigate further.

I removed the shroud  to see that the self cancelling system comprised of a pair of levers operated by a cam on the steering column. when the indicator is on, the cam pushes the lever to cancel it when the steering wheel is turned back.


















You can just make out that the cam is not exactly in the middle of the two levers - it should be, the wheels are exactly in the straight ahead position.

At first, I tried to move the cam - expecting it to be a spring clip that is just wrapped around the column but it wouldn't move. I spoke to some friends who thought that it was either spot welded on, or there was a 'pip' in the clip that went into a hole in the column. If so, I needed another way of moving it.

I looked under the bonnet for the steering column and decided to see if there was just enough room to move it round a few splines to ensure that the cam came back to the centre of the two levers.

I made a make shift pointer out of a ball point pen and some masking tape to enable me to count the number of splines required to get the cam close to the centre of the levers.

















In my crude way, I found that I needed to move the column by 2 or 3 splines to get the cam in the correct position.

Disconnecting the steering column flexible coupling (using the jubilee clip method in the 'horns' post) there was just enough room to move it round 2 splines. No more, because there is a flat in the column to allow the clamping bolt to pass. But, this was just enough.

Now that the cam is in the centre of the two levers, it still wouldn't work - the next bit was actually simpler than I thought. the indicator stalk simply needed unscrewing, pushing further in towards the steering column and then tightening. The screws go through a slotted hole, so there was some movement.

Brilliant, that now works. So before putting it back together, I sprayed the shroud black and put another indicator sticker on it.

The indicator sticker that I bought from Moss was a large sticker which would not sit correctly on the curvature of the shroud. The best thing to do is to cut out the white indicator symbol and just stick that on - looks great!

































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