Sir Joseph Lucas
(or encounters with the Prince Of Darkness)

By Annette Flottwell & Takeo De Meter
The Internet Land Rover Club

Takeo re-enacted these early days of Lucas lighting when he installed two petroleum lamps in front of a Range Rover’s reflectors to drive around the Stoneleigh Park meeting camp site last September. He assured me that you could actually see something in pitch-dark surroundings.

Dynamos and batteries

As maximum speeds increased it became necessary to have more efficient lighting.  By this time, Thomas Edison had already invented the electric light bulb which could be powered by a lead battery, which was a DC (direct current) device, so now a DC generating device was needed to keep the battery charged.  No problem said Lucas, and thus began during WW I manufacturing DC dynamos for the British transportation industry. In the 1920s they also started making batteries. It has been said many times that, when Joseph Lucas & Sons. designed the DC dynamo, they did so with neither an excess of copper nor steel.

How does a dynamo work?

The DC voltage generated by a DC dynamo is governed by three factors, and each factor has limitations.

• 1)  Number of turns of wire on the armature.  This value is fixed by the physical dimensions of the armature, and by the size of the wire. The more turns, the higher the voltage.  The larger the wire, the higher the current.
• 2)  Magnetic field developed in the field coil.  This depends upon the number of turns of wire and the current passing through the wire.  The output voltage will rise until the magnetic saturation of the pole piece is reached.
• 3)  The rotational speed of the armature, which is governed by the engine speed. In 1916 the Lucas lamp, designed for ground use, replaced earlier Aldis and Hucks lamps which had been designed for air to ground use. The Lucas was lighter, more portable in a ground role and had a narrower focused light beam.

When browsing for Lucas’ history, we also traced a Lucas production of bayonets during the second world war, when individual bayonets still absorbed 44 minutes to make each. In December 1942 they manufactured a "fabricated" bayonet which would reduce production time to 20 minutes. Lucas also made morse keys used in WW I and produced bicycles.

Lucas nostalgia...

Many of the early Lucas lamps are now collectors items, early adverts like seen above are reprinted. We found the early 1960s publicity here on an old motoring map when we recently sorted out the garage. The weirdest nostalgia item we found was a ‘high quality, heavy duty sticker’ with a Lucas logo, sold for $4.95 by a US mail order company to ‘enhance the looks of your battery’. I don’t know what they have been drinking but it must have been good stuff. More to the point is definitely the "LUCAS" Shirt, White letters (LUCAS logo in diminishing brightness) on black shirt sold by a British company. A more practical minded company offers the Lucas Service Kits ,Reliability made easy: A large percentage of running problems are put down to problems with the ignition, whether it is a faulty coil, cracked distributor cap, badly worn plugs and points or water getting into the electrics.
As you might expect, much of the Lucas history stays in the darkness. So here is Takeo’s view of the

Evolution of Lucas

The speed of light is now known to Man. This is a well established fact since my wife, who is an accomplished electrotechnical and electronics engineer, told me. OK, now what is the speed of dark ? My wife threatened to clobber me with a stabilized power supply when I asked her, so my best guess is that the speed of dark must be situated around 0 - 60 Mph, depending on which type of Land-Rover you are in at the time of measuring it. Even in 1968 or so I have never been overtaken by Dark while driving my Lancia 250 GT, but I overtook Dark on several occasions.

Until I found out that some Marelli electrics were, in fact, not much better than Lucas electrics and then it happened once, that I was even helped by Dark when an unlit SII break-down truck stopped by me at 11 pm on the shoulder of the road from Dover to Canterbury. The truck‘s lights were not working but the owner had a working torch, so it could be said that the loose wire in the Lancia was found with the help of Dark. And the speed of dark, at that time and before he stopped to help me, must have been something like 20 Mph. I paid the helpful man with a small box of fuses I had in my car and Dark became Light again, proving that Dark and Light can be complementary on the condition of meeting at the right time, somewhere on this planet. This also proves that I am writing utter nonsense right now. Okok, I‘ll try to do better.

The roots of Lucas electr(on)ics are firmly planted in the Dark Ages when someone asked for light and a Viking called Lukas Lukassen banged his head against a solid rock to make sparks with his tin helmet so that a torch could be lit. Later, a straight descendant of this early lighting pioneer started to make electrical components for motor vehicles, totally unaware of the early lighting experiments by his distant forebear. Another little-known fact are the Swabian origins of some other forefather. (Swabia is in what is now known as South Germany and the Swabians are the Saxon tribe that was shamefully expelled from Scotland for being cheap). So, there may have been some cause for concern by combining alleged hereditary concussion and cheapness when the fabrications by the Prince Of Darkness reached the early automotive market. At least that is what I deduct from having used their products (of course, I may be wrong, this is only my personal view), first in a 1951 Triumph TR2, in a TR6 later and, since 1980 in a Land-Rover 109 V8 a.k.a a Stage One.

So if one is interested in the evolution of Lucas motor electrics since its early years up to date one can basically say that there was little evolution until, at least, 1980: confusing wiring colours, crappy diagrams in which wiring colour changes under way, cheap switches made from the cheapest components available by the cheapest workforce available and some of the lousiest connector lay-outs ever seen since Josef Lukovitch Lukarenko tried to re-wire a Krapovitch half-track in 1917 for the Bolshevik forces during the October Revolution thereby causing an instrument panel fire that eventually led to the explosion of a trainload of artillery ammunition in the enemy camp whereby half of the Tzarist forces were blown into the next week thus allowing for a Soviet State to come into existence and 70 + years of shitty USSR electrics.

It is also suspected that Lucas Electrics have, over the years, occasioned more additions to the Dictionary Of Foul Language in the UK only than all galley slaves together during the whole existence of the Roman Empire. You will certainly understand my reluctance to illustrate this, although the well-known German Randsteinschlotzer's swearword "@#$$!" seems to be a close derivative of its UK "@#$$!!" rat catcherŒs and night soil collector's counterpart which, in turn, is often used by anyone who has ever come within a mile of anything made by Lucas.

What about encounters with Lucas in 4WDs then?

In British vehicles (that applies for all older motorbikes as for MGs, Triumphs, Morrises Austins and Jaguars as well as for Land Rovers), you will find Lucas Dynamos or generators powering a 24V or 12 V positive earth system. All Nissans or Datsuns had 12 volt positive earth as well as many American cars had the same before 1960, so this was NOT singular to Lucas. This can be pretty confusing if you are not used to it, about the same as changing from LHD to RHD.

We recently had the experience of starting a 1600 Series One engine from 1949 for the first time after it had been stored in a barn for ten years. (see picture) It must be said that we first looked for knots in our logic till we had figured out what was wrong. When the third coil and a crappy distributor cable were replaced an improvised connection from battery - to SW (ignition switch) and distributor to CB (contact breaker) finally produced the spark desired in 30 year old Lucas plugs. So the engine started to our immense joy after such a long period of rest. It was definitely the earliest 4WD electrics we ever touched - and it worked.

So why are we swearing so often about Lucas?

My personal most hated Lucas item is the combined light/horn switch. It keeps falling apart in my Series Three, because all the light wires, which are too flimsy to start with, run through a plastic whatsit held together by rivets. This heats up easily, so the rivets become loose and your indicator lever falls out just when you are changing lanes in thick traffic. Takeo tells me that he has been through 267 of these in 22 years, I believe it. Our club president Alain tells me that in his early Discovery it is exactly the same, they obviously never saw a reason to improve that in 30 years.

Another nuisance is the voltage stabilizer in the instrument panel:

Undocumented in the workshop manual, this thing reduces the voltage of your instruments to something around 9 Volts. It is a bi-metal contact heated by a heater wire. It produces an intermittent on/off pulse rather that a steady output. The fact that the fuel and temperature gauges are of the hot wire type means that they are slow to react and so the pulses are not detectable.

The instruments’ hot wire technology also has another side-effect: that means if you have a hole in your bulkhead behind the instrument panel, cold air, dependent on speed and wind direction, will influence the reading of your engine temperature and fuel gauges. Very precise! While you could have understood that other solutions were not available in the early sixties, I’m sure that when my 1982 Series Three was manufactured, hot-wire technology was outdated even in East Germany. Trabbi owners will agree that their temperature gauge was not wind dependent.

Hot wire technology at its best: My burnt-out instrument panel

Headlights, sidelights and indicators in Series vehicles actually demand a water level indicator. Both the screw in indicators and the clamped headlights fill with rain water, spray and brine in winter. There is no drain plug, so if you wonder why your indicator doesn’t work when you switch on the headlights on dark Flemish winter evening, check the water level first before you start looking for the mass problem. My right indicator once was half - full, I was only perplexed it still worked occasionally.

Alternator and starter motor problems are well known among Series Land Rover owners. My Stage One’s starter motor came with a reductor, Takeo’s didn’t. We found that out after that piece of whatist had broken down in Luxembourg in January. Yes it is fun to drive home without a starter motor for 4 hours in winter. Hitting it with a hammer hadn’t worked. At first I was delighted because that motor was not so heavy and you could get your tools in somehow.. My delight immediately turned into total disbelief when I opened the housing. Three planetary gears run in a plastic ring gear, till the soft plastic teeth are deformed by the initial starting torque of the armature assembly. The play increases with every more or less succesful attempt to start. Thus the sun gear one day won’t engage into the planetary gears anymore and there you face another 250 EUR repair.

Has that improved? No says the American Range Rover owner

‘the reliability of Rover/Lucas electrics, nothing much has changed since the Series days and I would say the problems are about the same although to be fair most of them are not disabling but have to do with the various complex systems in Range Rovers. People in the UK don't seem to report as many problems as those in the US, and I often wonder if Lucas electrics are designed for cold wet climates and don't do well in other situations!!’

The same goes for an Australian who wrote:

‘I solved the problems by replacing the whole electronic ignition with a Bosch unit, and I already had a Bosch alternator. I am in a Land Rover Owners club with over 600 members, and as much as we love Landies, I don't know anyone who actually likes Lucas Electrics.’

Discoveries are also liable to central door locks that don’t disengage, intermittent light problems and some more.

We’ll continue this with more detailed hints how to cure some of the known problems, more about modern LandRovers and some of the implications of positive ground. We will also show how to install a brand new wiring harness in an early LandRover and how to cope with a burnt-out instrument panel.

To be continued . . .

The Internet Land Rover Club