Copiertech
28-12-2009, 10:04 PM
Went out today and it was -9.5c started her up put the demisters on and scraped the screen, the mirror heaters melted the ice in a couple of minutes so we hit the road, once we were on a fast road i noticed the drivers mirror steaming more than usual, but other than that it looked perfect. a couple of miles later the bottom edge of the mirror started turning brown, then the steam turned to black smoke and the car started to stink of acrid burning plastic, then flames started licking out the bottom edge of the mirror glass, i got the mrs to grab the wheel and i put the window down, ripped the mirror and wiring off and threw it away from the car onto the grass at the side of the road and stopped. The glass cracked when I threw it, and the glass was hot enough to burn my fingers. I wondered how the hell this could happen without blowing the fuse, so i checked the rating against the book and it was ok, and i tested it by shorting the wiring and it blew straight away so how could it get so hot to go on fire. The inside of the mirror housing was scorched too.
The mrs said if she was driving she probably wouldn`t have noticed it until it was too late, and even if she had she would just have got out the car and run, and the car would have went up in no time, its kind of put her off replacing her clk with a b8 a4 especially since there was no last measure protection against that sort of thing, working in electronics I know that many heating elements or transformers contain a thermal fuse that opens if it goes above a dangerous temperature shutting off the power preventing a fire. The mirror didn`t contain one of these, a **** piece of design on audis part IMO. I wonder how many other safety corners they cut to save a few pence on each car.
http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/4253/img0851ti.jpg (http://img692.imageshack.us/i/img0851ti.jpg/)http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/img0851ti.jpg/1/w640.png (http://g.imageshack.us/img692/img0851ti.jpg/1/)
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/4986/img0855.jpg (http://img340.imageshack.us/i/img0855.jpg/)[URL=http://g.imageshack.us/img340/img0855.jpg/1/][IMG]http://img340.images
The mrs said if she was driving she probably wouldn`t have noticed it until it was too late, and even if she had she would just have got out the car and run, and the car would have went up in no time, its kind of put her off replacing her clk with a b8 a4 especially since there was no last measure protection against that sort of thing, working in electronics I know that many heating elements or transformers contain a thermal fuse that opens if it goes above a dangerous temperature shutting off the power preventing a fire. The mirror didn`t contain one of these, a **** piece of design on audis part IMO. I wonder how many other safety corners they cut to save a few pence on each car.
http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/4253/img0851ti.jpg (http://img692.imageshack.us/i/img0851ti.jpg/)http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/img0851ti.jpg/1/w640.png (http://g.imageshack.us/img692/img0851ti.jpg/1/)
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/4986/img0855.jpg (http://img340.imageshack.us/i/img0855.jpg/)[URL=http://g.imageshack.us/img340/img0855.jpg/1/][IMG]http://img340.images