I hereby announce the second death of my Astra.
The first death was before I owned the car when the company fleet that owned it didn't fill up with enough oil. It dried up and that was the end of the engine. New engine was fitted.
Today, the Astra died for the second time.
On my way to the rolling road day arranged by the East of England region of Astra Owners Network, I left at around 5am. Just getting towards the M25 junction, and for a split second my headlights went off and back on again. I thought I was going mad, but my mate said he saw it too. I think the interior LEDs on the headunit, dials, etc, also went out, but not certain. It happened too quickly at the same time as I blinked. I went carefully for a bit trying to work out if anything didn't seem right, and all seemed OK.
Got to the Birchanger services on the M11, did a quick pedal test, no error codes. Took a glance around the car, couldn't see anything wrong. Spoke to GazzaC about it who said he had the same thing before and it was the CIM, so I thought OK, I'll get that checked out.
Proceeded to travel up with our convoy to Courtenay Sport... all going well... until I got to the A11/A1035 roundabout. Approaching it and then suddenly my headlights went out, all interior LEDs went out, stereo turned off, windscreen wipers stuck in the middle of the screen...
ALL electrics lost, but engine still happily revving away. Took it across the roundabout, tried to put my hazard lights on, but of course, they're electric. So no hazard lights. Turned off the engine, tried to turn it back on, nothing, so quickly stuck it on the grass verge to the side of the road and tried again. Nothing.
Looked at my mate and said "Something don't.... DAN. SMOKE. OUT OF CAR. RUN".
There was smoke bellowing into the footwell on the passenger side. Nothing on my side, but we quickly jumped out and ran about 50m back down the road. Smoke bellowing out the sides of the bonnet and the car filled with thick smoke in about 5 seconds.
Called the police out for assistance and recovery, opened the doors to let the smoke out and stood back.
Nothing more happened, the smoke dispersed and left this burnt plastic smell in the car which is still there now. I'm gonna need a s*** load of Febreeze to get rid of that.
Got taken to a local recovery depot, because £450 to get towed home was a bit pricey. My parents came up and used their AA membership and a little touch of BS (Oh yes, I was in the car when it broke down...) to get an AA guy to come and look at the car and get it transported to either a garage local to home... or home...
They came and looked, and turns out the power cable that used to power my subs had come unsecured and caused a short in the circuit (I don't know why the hell I didn't think to disconnect it). This short in the circuit then surged the battery, causing all the electrics to die, burnt out and melted the cable and murdered the battery.
When we disconnected the power cable and hooked up a battery booster, the car ran perfectly. No problems at all. So I'm lucky none of the other electrics got affected, otherwise I could be in seriously big repair figures.
We pulled up the interior trim that the cable ran under and took a look at the cables, and it had basically melted itself around the loom, so when you peel away all the charred cabling, it ripped and shredded all the loom. So I'm now going to need a whole new loom down the left side of the car, as in the state it's in now, it's irreparable. It must be replaced.
So the Astra is now dead until I can get a new battery and a new loom.
And for some pics (The very very few I got)..
Being loaded onto the truck:
How we found the loom (This isn't the worst bits):
I'm really gutted right now, but what's done is done. Just gotta look forward and get it repaired!
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