Sorry to hear of your Vanagon troubles (is that a double negative?).
#1. Always disconnect the battery ground.
#2. The blue hi-beam is a bulb with a blue cover, not an LED. Might still be able to
get one from dealer $$.
Good luck.
Jerry

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Harris" <rdh24@CORNELL.EDU>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Friday, May 06, 2005 11:23 AM
Subject: holy smokes (melted the instrument circuit)

> hi y'all,
> Back on the list after being unsubscribed since December... yeah theres a
> metric ton of email every day but I missed y'all!  Never see any Vanagons
> around my town, they're a rare breed up here in the Northeast any
> more.  Just about the first email I got was the thread about how if you
> park nose-up in the rain you get to hear a loud water drip from inside the
> left rear sail pillar all night long, long hours of wishing you had
> remembered to park the other way round -- I about fell out of my chair
> laughing -- another one of those quirks you think you were the only one to
> remark on, and it turns out everybody has had the same experience!!
>
> ANyway I was working on my 84 Westy last night and it turned into a classic
> Vanagon experience... the way a tiny 2 cent problem you think will take ten
> minutes to fix degrades into a Big Deal that takes hours...  just had to
> share with you guys.
>
> So for a long time now my high beam indicator LED has not been
> working.  After blinding many an oncoming driver, last night I finally
> decided to fix the thing.  Took the dash cluster out, messed around w/ the
> multimeter and determined that the LED was burned up.  Quick trip to Radio
> Shack, bought new LED, out with the old one and in with the new, all with a
> minimum of cursing and only one beer... so far so good.  Went to reinstall
> the gauge cluster on the dashboard and suddenly one of the little
> incandescent instrument illumination lights that lights up the speedometer
> is on the fritz.  It's dark and cold by now and I'm working by feel so I
> just kind of wiggle the bulb around in its socket hoping to make it get a
> good contact.
>
> That's when all the instruments lights flickered out and grey smoke started
> pouring off the mylar printed circuit sheet.  Aaaack!  Punched off the
> light switch to stop the juice, yanked the gauge cluster out again, and
> back to the workbench.  Ahh, the heady aroma of burning German
> plastic.  (usually followed shortly by the smell of burning MasterCard
> plastic)   Turns out the printed copper contacts behind the bulbs are all
> starting to lift off the plastic sheet they were printed on, and when I
> wiggled the bulb one of the circuit tracks moved far enough to short out
> against a ground track.  So the instrument light circuit track is now all
> melted, and the headlight switch rheostat is kaput.  Not only that, I soon
> discovered that in my excitement to yank the instrument pod back off the
> dash, I tore part of the printed circuit sheet, disabling half of
> it!   Aaaaack!
>
> Let's see....  in two carefree hours I have gone from having a perfectly
> functional dash cluster (w/ the exception of the hi beam LED) to having a
> dash cluster that is (a) melted, and (b) torn.  Although in theory the hi
> beam indicator would work now.  By midnight I was calm enough to go to bed,
> and early this morning before work I started painstakingly soldering in
> wires to bypass the damaged parts of the mylar circuit sheet.  Will finish
> the job tonight, PROVIDED nothing else goes haywire in the process!
>
> Vanagons!  Why do we love them!?
>
> Still keeping my cool in upstate NY,
> Robert H.