508 - short circuit?

[puh]

Hi

I´m new here and i need som help.
I have a little problem that i think is caused by bad ground or maybe short circuit and i hope that someone here can give me a hint so i can solve it. Then i had been driving a while suddenly the temp meter fall, the fuel meter fall and the oil pressure meter rise. Does anyone know if there is a ground connection that has a relation to the meters? The error is only showing after about 15 minutes on the road. Not when i start my 508.
My 508 is from 1978.

[Admin]

Although this originally is a Dutch forum, I'll reply in English for your convenience.

There is a central earth connection under the instrument panel. If you lift the panel (careful, the speedometer cable keeps it in place) you'll see a bolt with a big pile of eyelets on it.
If you lift the panel and have the engine running you can try to find the bad connection by moving all wires underneath one by one until the error can be seen.

The difference between a short and an open circuit can easily be found with a multimeter. Look for a +12 V terminal on one of the instruments. Connect the other lead to a reliably earth! As soon as the error occurs, read the meter. On a short circuit it will indicate a voltage drop; with a bad earth connection the voltage remains 12. You can do the same with a 12 V 10 W lamp with two wires soldered to it.

Good luck!

[puh]

Thanks for your answer.
The reason i wrote to you is that i couldn´t find any forum or club here in Sweden and i couldn´t find any forum in english either.
If someone know a web adress to a english forum or club for MB 508 i would be greatful.

Best regards
Björn / Sweden

[Admin]

Hi Björn,

We once had a visitor from Australia who wrote that he never had found any 508 forum in English. So I doubt if there is one.
I propose to rename this forum to Campertechniek International

BTW please tell us if you have found the cause for your electrical error.

[puh]

That would be a great idea :D
Actually i think that it´s strange that there aint any international forum or web pages for this bus.
I guess that there must be a lot of them around the world.
A working collegue has one as mine but a little bigger and i know another here in my town that are realy good looking.

By the way, I´ll tell you how the work with the electrical error are going. Maybe i take a look at it this weekend.

Take care
Björn

[Admin]

I guess that there must be a lot of them around the world.

You're right. 500.000 altogether (minus the ones that are scrapped by now).

There are an active forum or two in German. And maybe some in Urdu, Swahili, Hindi or Arabic

[puh]

And maybe some in Urdu, Swahili, Hindi or Arabic

Can you translate them for me?
German aint my langage either but i work for a German company here in Sweden
We bought our MB in October last year so there is still a lot of new things to learn about it.
Before this we had 3 caravans one of them was actually a dutch. Avant was the name of it.
No one here in Sweden have ever heard of it so we had a lot of questions on the camps about the caravan. After these three caravans we had a Combi Camp and a tent. Now we try this MB 508 and see how we like it.

Are there really 500.000 still running :o :o
That was a surprise.

[Admin]

Are there really 500.000 still running

Not "still running". Some have crashed, some are rusted away... But they manufactured a number like that!

[puh]

Ok, i see. I thougt it was a lot of them.
On how many years did they make those?
When did the stop the manufacturing?

[Admin]

The "Düsseldorfer" series (406/407/409/508/608/613/O309 etc.) has been manufactured from 1967 until 1986.
But now we are getting more and more off topic.

[puh]

Yes you are right.
I´ll keep you informed about the error and let you know how it it end (i hope it will end).
Otherwise maybe i can ask for more help?
I found a Electrical chematic here in this forum and now i have transleted it from Dutch to Swedish with help from google.

Take care

Best regards
Björn

[puh]

As i promised before so should i now tell how the work has gone with the electrical failure.
I started with checking the fuse box and found it little dirty so i cleaned it up.
After that i had to pic up my son at a friend and then i had to do other things so i let my MB be.
Next day i took it to my work and there wasn´t any error on the way :o
There wasn´t any error on the way back home either and there hasn´t been any since then.
Could it be so simple that the error was in the fuse box
I was happy for that because i had to put all my energy on fixing the parking brake that got stucked.
That took me two days

Thanks anyway for the help i got here.
/ Björn

[Admin]

Glad it's solved! No thanks.