Yup! It was placing that tiny LED conductor into the Euro connector at just the right location and depth that was the biggest problem. I had to have perfect focus to have half a chance. And then there's my shaky hands to contend with. All in all I'm happy that I'm mobile today. My back was no worse than it normally is in the morning. I take two Tylenol Arthritis Formula in the morning. I can't take Advil or any other INSAIDs because I'm already on a anti-coagulant (Eliquis) and all the INSAIDs thin blood. So the Tylenol has got to do it all.
And yes… that's an AMC Pacer in the lot. It's a NEO model bought from American Excellence, a great die cast car site. And it's also a 2CV Citroen. Good eyes. I had to buy the Pacer in honor of the singularly worst car we've ever owned. I've purchased 26 cars in my driving career and the Pacer rules the roost of the worst. It was a car that should not have been.
It had a ton of firsts. First electronic ignition, first power rack and pinion steering in an American car. What it wasn't was the first in was the first 2-rotor Wankel engine in a passenger car. It was supposed to be the recipient of the GM rotary engine project. The car was designed around that engine. Then GM dropped the program, leaving AMC with a car without an engine. At that point the Pacer project should have died too, but AMC continued and brought out the car with their crappy, ancient straight 6 engine. The engine was too long for the engine compartment so they built a box into the firewall to accept the back two cylinders. It made changing those two plugs almost impossible. I believe they had to drop the engine to do that. The engine was terrible and probably screwed up the weight balance too.
The electronic ignition had dissimilar metals in the primary connector between the control unit and distributor. This created galvanic corrosion that would intermittently break the connection when you hit a bump of sufficient g-force. Coincidentally, that was the same g-force generated when crossing RR tracks, which caused the engine to suddenly shut off. With the engine off you lost power steering and power brakes. It was also the same g-force from going up a curb cut into a shopping center from a main street. You had to get out of the car, open the hood, separate and remake the connection and then the engine would start. Fun!!!
The paint was so bad that you could wipe pigment on a rag after it rained. They claimed it was due to "Industrial Fallout". The inner door panels kept coming loose. The emergency brake cable broke because it was routed directly on top of the hot exhaust manifold pipe. And the rack and pinion power steering failed due to leakage at both end seals of the power piston. It was as if the car was designed to kill its occupants.
In other words, it was awful.
This is a picture of our 1 (now 46) year-old son in front of said Pacer. The kids loved the car since it had a "Way back" under the big glass lift gate. It was very roomy and fun to drive. It would have been great if it wasn't such a disaster. We traded it less than two years for an Old's Delta 88, which was great car which we kept for 10 years.
I just replaced an LED puck under-cabinet light. They're supposed to last 50,000 hours. Yes! The LEDs themselves have a very long life span. Unfortunately, there's other components in the circuit that can fail earlier, and in this one they did. It was intermittent between bright and very, very dim, and then all-the-time dim. I couldn't find that same brand I bought a few years ago, so settled for another. They were inexpensive; 3 pucks and control circuits for $18.00 from Amazon. I tested the other puck with my LED test rig and it was very dim and then tested the new one and it was bright, so I made the switch. They're all 12 VDC without current limiters since those are built into the puck, and it's that current limiter that probably failed.
Since I bought the 3-pack I have two spares to replace any others that die. Unfortunately, the new one is not the same brightness of the one on the other side of the stove, but it's better than completely dark. I'm going to continue to look for the original ones I bought so I could replace it with one of equal brightness. So that's my Saturday report. Oh… I pulled the t-pins on the foam wall and it's completely glued. So there's that...
