Brake Light Broke

 I was on my way to visit my girlfriend in the Stylus a few days ago, I pulled up at a red light & a black BMW pulled up beside me & rolled the passenger window down. I was expecting a "nice motor mate" or "is that a Ginetta?" but instead I got "Your brake lights are stuck on mate".

Oh good, the brake lights again.

On the road trip last year they weren't working at all to begin with (my own fault) & I'd recently had some problems making the pedal switch work properly. I found somewhere to stop & disconnected the pedal switch - the hydraulic switch works fine, the pedal switch is there because it comes on faster & is in theory more reliable.

The pedal switch was a standard microswitch with a roller that should trigger as the roller rolls off of a mushroom headed bolt in the footwell roof. But if I was gentle, the pedal wasn't quite moving upright far enough to switch it off. Come smartly off the brake & it was fine.

I ordered a new microswitch with a long flat "blade" & drew up a block that could bolt to the hole the mushroom headed bolt had screwed into & trip the switch a slightly different way. Then when I got home I measured it all up properly, changed the design to suit the real world & printed the block. It all appears to work fine, there's a few things to consider, obviously my foot shouldn't catch the block & neither should the pedal, the wiring to the switch shouldn't be able to short out on anything etc

So there it is - the picture shows everything except the car. The grey angle is bolted between the pedal & the footpad - which is alloy, the microswitch screws to that as does a black polyurethane buffer which is just there to protect the wiring if I'm bleeding the brakes so the pedal is going to the bulkhead & the blueish bit is screwed to the footwell roof by the orange bolt & has an edge to trigger the switch. So far it works, but if it all goes wrong again, I can just unplug it.

When I started measuring the real world I thought I had a problem, the riv-nut for the bolt is M6, an M6 bolt head was too deep to let the pedal pass below it. Then while rummaging through a tub of bolts I found a furniture bolt that was M6 & the head is only 2mm thick. Problem solved & god bless Ikea!