keith2.2

Can someone please confirm my theory one way or t'other...

Being a tart, I've put gold washers and alloy bolts in the engine bay.

Two of the bolts I replaced were the earth points at the front of the bay on the wings.

Now - hadn't checked before, so I'm not 100% that they were operating normally, but:

Is this alloy bolted earth point nonsense the most likely cause for my right headlight to be flickering, my left headlight to not be operating at all and my left indicator lights (all three) to be constantly on at about 30% brightness, and not flashing when the using the indicators?

The fuses are definitely ok so is this an earthing issue?

If so - back in with the normal, dreary bolts on those to points

*edit* I'm asking rather than trying because the car is 100 miles away!

Si2k

Clean up the paint around the bolt hole and it will be fine

WinFreak

Yeh just make sure the earth connection touches the metal of the car instead of the paint

U9aXy6Dn

I would also do the following..

1) Blingy bolts are often anodised. Make sure you remove that coating from the contact-facing side of the blingy bolt with wire wool (or other suitable abbrasive tool) before attaching. Doing this also means you don't have to scratch paint from the body panels of the car, as long as the connectors make clean contact with the underside of the ally bolt (which when you wind it in, will obviously make perfect contact with the body panel). Most people also scratch too much paint off of the body panel and end up creating an un-necessary rust problem - I've seen it half a dozen times at least.

2) Inside both access holes of the inner wings, there are connectors that can fail to make perfect contact on older cars. They are a pita to gain access to however, cleaning up those connections cured an intermittent problem I experienced with HIDs not functioning.

keith2.2

Thanks chap, really useful info!

Iil-dik

A guy on the rs site had the same problem when he did alloy bolts had to revert back to normal