Old car problems and denial can be serious business. I own a 1968 New Yorker that plagued me with intermittent lighting problems for years. As a result, I drove it mostly in daylight. I would anticipate the problem for a few weeks each fall, when late car shows and early sunsets arrive, then in the spring I’d forget about it.

It initially checked out as a bad headlamp switch, which on this car is a toggle instead of the universal push-pull variety. So, apart came the dash and in went a switch rebuilt by a fellow in Oklahoma who charged just $100. The replacement worked great for the rest of the season, but then I lost my brake and running lamps the following spring after I'd replaced the four side-marker lamps. I pinned the trouble on high-draw bulbs. I figured it needed another headlamp switch, so apart came the dash again.

Everything was fine for another season, maybe two, and then the ammeter was acting up, and the headlamps — which were on a separate circuit running via the same switch — went dark without notice. I concluded that it had to be the circuit breaker in that second headlamp switch. I opened up the dash once more, and then again because the connector felt loose on the back of the switch, and once again, until I couldn’t find half the screws I needed to put the dash back together.

I figured I'd had it licked.

I have a friend who loves old cars but hates to spend money on them, so most of his fleet are in various states of malfunction and disease. He has an early 2000s Corvette that looks as though it was used as a cab in NYC with more than 150,000 miles. He drives it year round, including to the town compost heap with snow tires on it. Following his tired Corvette home one dark evening on winding country roads, I smelled something. I whiffed and sniffed. It smelled kind of electrical, but it could be a clutch, I thought, and his clutch, since I was driving an automatic. In addition, it couldn't have been burning wires—I’d dug through the fuse box, replaced six switches, and had the dash apart 10 times. I told myself, "Enough, it can't be me. It has to be him! Besides, I have working lights!"

Read on to discover... there were two separate, unrelated problems causing similar results that tripped me up. Lesson: Don’t traffic in automotive denial. Study a wiring harness carefully. And stay on a malfunction until you find it.