Lotus Elan and Lotus Elan Plus 2 Forums

Jon
You have a couple of high resistance connections (from what you've said) somewhere in the wiring loom behind the dash,one in the battery feed to the ignition switch-ignition switch onwards and the other in the wiring to the down feed to the window motor....

Hope this helps..

John

Jon,

My car is a '69 S and as mentioned before my windows have a supply seperate from the ignition switch. At some point Lotus added a second supply from the ignition switch and on some diagrams show both in place, on later diagrams it shows the original supply that I have disconnected from the switch and connected together and insulated.

Do you know what colour the supply wires to the window switches were?

Chris.

ps. pm sent.

Thanks for all your great input chaps!

Chris - I've cleared my Inbox so your PM should get through now.

I attach a photo of the rear of my dash before installation - can you see anything obvious?

I'm resigned to the fact that I'm going to have to take it out as the problem seems to be related to the dash wiring.

Cheers

Jon

Before you go to the effort of taking the dash out again, if you disconnect your car battery you may be able to do a fair amount of diagnosis by using the ohm meter portion of a multimeter on those parts of the wiring that are accessible.

The brown wire on the starter solenoid is the starting point as that is the primary feed from the battery to the fuse box, from where the other wires go to their relevant functions.


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I saw a replacement ignition switch on sale recently on the web somewhere. It is likely to be on either Kelvedon, QED or BurtonPower.

Jon,

It looks like you have installed a new loom, yes?

Only supposing here but if you have a new loom it may have been made up with the two different supplies to the windows, and it looks from your picture that you have four connections on the back of each switch. I checked my notes from my dash and I only had three. The difference between yours and mine is that you have a White/Black and a Green cable connected on the two bottom connections, I only have the White/Black. It could be, and this only a guess, that you have connected two supplies to the switch, the Green from the ignition switch was a modification and when done the W/B cables were taken off the switches and connected together as they also feed the clock, hazard lights and the cigarette lighter.

As a quick check the W/B cable is fed from the front fuse box, if you look for the fuse with the W/B cable coming out and take that fuse out, then try the windows with the ignition off, they should not work, turn the ignition on and try them again, if they work you know you have dual fed them.

I am not absolutely sure that this would cause the problems you are having but do the check with the fuse out before taking the dash off and see what happens, I do not want to be sending you off on a red herring and cause you more work than is necessary.

If you want to pm me with a contact you can and I can give you a call.

Chris.

Chris,

You're absolutely correct! Mike Duff latched onto this as well.

I have just returned from the garage and managed to disconnect the 2 green wires without removing the dash (through the ash tray aperture). All is now working as it should be

The new loom had 2 options (actually it had several options to cover a number of minor variants). For some reason I think I must have used 2 different wiring diagrams and had wired both the white/black and the green.

I'm happy now

Many thanks for everyone's help and suggestions. This really is an excellent forum.

Cheers

Jon

Glad you got it sorted Jon, and with out taking out the dash.

But don't worry, when you get it on the road I am sure you will find lots of other brain teasers to keep you busy

Chris,

Congrats Jon. I see what the guys are talking about now; on one of my diagrams it shows the additional supply wires as dotted.