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Sedans Buick Regal Buick Regal Electrical Problems
249 messages, Last post on Nov 17, 2009 at 1:56 PM
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its a switch? I was driving today and ALL the indicator lights went on, and odometer/ clock started flickering. then my car seized up and died while i was driving... took 20 minutes before i could start it again and drive home with the hazards on at least. could this be the ignition or just electrical problems just in the dash? 
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Replying to: seadog27 (Jan 29, 2008 1:11 pm)
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Replying to: belpheglore923 (Nov 11, 2008 6:31 pm) |
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| I have a 2001 Buick Regal. I have started having trouble getting the key out of the ignition when I turn the car off. the key will only go far enough to turn off the battery and will stop there not letting me be able to take the key out. any suggestions as to what is causing this? | |
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Replying to: gary81 (Dec 22, 2008 3:26 pm)
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Replying to: hoodlatch (Nov 22, 2008 7:44 am) GM did not plan for those bulbs to outlast the cars. My guess is that if you are experiencing this problem, your car has a lot of miles on the clock (== many hours of work for the bulbs). When my wife bought her LeSabre at 156k miles (and those miles were not honest, I'm estimating it had done close to 200k), about one-third of all bulbs were dead. One month later, more than half of them were dead. They were at the end of their mortality curve. Another possibility is that they can be blown by a faulty charging circuit. The life span of an incandescent bulb decreases as the 7-th power of over-voltage! They must be substantially under-rated for the voltage range in the car (where it's normal to see voltages reaching 15V). The bulbs used in those cars are rated for 12V. That sucks. Not only because it's a pain to replace them, but also because they are hard to find. My guess is that they are custom made for the factories supplying the assembled boards to GM. I could not find them in the general suppliers' catalogs, and it was useless to ask the dealers: they told me those bulbs don't have a part number and can only be replaced with the component they're in. Which, if you count them all, far exceeds $1000. If you are lucky, you might find all that stuff at a junkyard, but there is hardly any sense in that, because the bulbs are likely to be old. Replacing the instrument panel will give you trouble, too. It keeps a copy of the odometer value, and it will scream if the value is incorrect; some simply refuse to work, requiring re-programming. My solution was much better, overall, but I screwed up in the middle and it ended up costing me more than I planned (but still less than replacing components, or putting up with the dead lights). I think I bough these bulbs from Radio Shack: http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102815 I can't recall for sure -- 5 years after the fact, but they sort of look like this. I vaguely remember having to remove the black tubing and possibly also the multi-stranded leads and replacing them with solid wire. At any rate, if you go to Radio Shack and ask for the smallest 12V bulb, that will be it. I couldn't find anything that would be even nearly as small. This bulb is still larger than the original GM bulb, but it fits in most places without surgery. In some parts, you might need to widen the hole, but that should be it. Some of the original bulbs are colored. They have pull-over silicone filters on them. These can be pulled off and replaced on the new bulbs. Disassembling all those parts and replacing all bulbs, some possibly requiring "custom fit" is a bit tedious, but that's fine, considering the cost of any alternative. I did not count, but I think I spent between 5 and 10 hours over several months, whenever I had time and courage to rip out one component or another. CAUTION: those Radio Shack bulbs are crap! They have a manufacturing defect that makes some of them fail almost instantly, and when they fail, they can cause damage to the circuit they're in. Because when they blow (for whatever reason), they create a short circuit, and it's a very good short circuit. One of those rejects blew my instrument cluster a few hours after I put it in. Instead of dying quietly, it shorted the printed circuit in the cluster, and its leads got so hot that they fried the adjacent area of board to charcoal, sending stray current into the processor chip, whose pins were right next to it. That cost me $120, because I had to send the cluster for repair. If anyone is interested, I might be able to locate the company in Illinois that did the repair -- their prices were not that bad compared with the cost of the new components. Anyway, I did not give up, but I had to remove all new bulbs again and subject them to a simple endurance test, which you can start with, if you want to follow this path. Connect all these bulbs to a 15V source for several days. If you don't have a suitable source at home, connect them to the car and ride with them for a week or two. My prediction is that 10-20% of those bulbs will blow during the test. The rest can be safely used in the car. I did this 5 years ago; the car (and myself) have since moved to Scotland. The car is still running and the bulbs are shining, and I had no more failures. It would be a bummer if I had: there is no Radio Shack in Scotland. One more thing: I had to visit 6-7 different Radio Shacks to gather enough bulbs to do the complete repair. They don't stock them in large quantities. FWIW, --Gene |
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Replying to: dwmays (Feb 09, 2008 5:35 pm) |
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| I have a 94 regal. 2 injectors are not getting electricity any thoughts? | |
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Replying to: Mr_Shiftright (Nov 11, 2008 3:59 pm) 
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