One thing I noticed was the boot courtesy light not working. The one in the ceiling was working OK.
I thought it would be a simple lightbulb replacement but no.
So I removed the lighthousing and checked the lightbulb. This looked fine though 12V 5W. I noticed the metal holder was slightly lose. Apparently one side had a small piece of mounting plastic broken off. So the lightbulb wasn't properly fit and a little shaky as a result.This wasn't however the cause of the light not working
Luckily the small plastic dot was still floating around in the lighthousing. So I had this glued back. On the photo you can see the red circles for demonstration purposes :-)
The glueing thing worked out quite well, and all is firmly in position again. You can see on the next photo the lense as well which was quite dirty. So I had that rinsed with soapy water and a brush
So all is looking good and shiny again:
Even though this courtesy light has some kind of push button it does not do anything really. You can push it inwards but it will not trigger a cut off or whatsoever. Oh well.
When I had it removed I noticed one wire end did not look original anymore. A different thick wire with a aftermarket connector:
So next I checked the light switch:
Of course it was terribly rusty and in a poor condition. When doing voltage measuring I sometimes got mixed results from nothing up to nearly 6V. When measuring directly to a proper metal ground I got 12V. When fiddling around with the connector it snapped off:
So it was very likely this connection had some mass problem. Doing further checking of the cable harness I noticed the extra black tape used as isolation. So undoing this the original mass cable (purple) came to light. I could not trace it back any further to the light-switch. I'm not sure what happened there but they have added a new bypass mass cable between the switch and the courtesy light. Typical.
The purple mass cable still had the original connector attached to it. As said I could not trace it back to see where it stopped - it went into antother cable section into the rearbumper. To much work to dig into to make it original again.
For now I reused the existing cabling and used new cable connector shoes. But the real issue was the broken and rusty light switch.
So I fired up a working online EPER site to look up the part details. Finding a working EPER site was a struggle as usual. Then I noticed the Kappa SW is not listed, the sedan and coupe are available though. I think this is because the SW is build by Pininfarina and as such is using their part numbers. Sigh!
So I searched for Fiat and Lancia light switches and was lucky to find it somehow. This particular switch was used on a Fiat 124 spider! Which of course is a Pininfarina design :-) The part number was 4258476 :
The difficulty is now to find an affordable one with normal shipping costs. A lot of companies did happen to be offering this outside of the Netherlands. Some affordable but then having hefty shipping costs. So I ended buying one via Martin Willems for € 3,50 Shipping was twice as expensive. Still cheaper then driving up and down.
The one I got supplied was having black plastic though and the push pin was slightly longer as well
But it was functional and all fitted perfectly. How nice is that:
And more important, the light is now working again:
But there is still one issue with it. The used screw in the light switch, is not 100% fit. Either the screw is not original or the hole is just to wide to tighten the screw firmly. The screw is making the ground contact as the other part of the switch is touching the paint and not metal ground. Meaning a lose scew is resulting in a poor mass contact. I checked and indeed you can move the switch a little and the light goes off. The used screw is of course a bit rusty by now but I also consider it to long and doubt if it's the original one. I will have it replaced in any case.