My cigarette lighter has stopped working. I was using it to power my portable air compressor. I had the car running to air up my tires. I heard a click from inside the car and the compressor stopped. I checked the fuse for lighter and it wasn't blown. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

I don't have a link to the correct Club Lexus thread that addresses this handy, but the LS400 has a known problem with a fuselink which is inside the cigarette lighter socket itself.

If you have a little bit of MacGyver in you, you can take apart the cigarette lighter mechanism and rebuild it in about 20 minutes and engineer out the unnecessary redundant and failure-prone fuselink, then it works fine, that is what I did.

I found a write up on here with a lot of helpful pics which were key to understanding and reworking the design.

however, I should add that powering a small air compressor via the cigarette lighter is not recommended, I realize that the compressor is designed to plug into the cigarette lighter but it is a dangerous design, what you want to do is go to Radio Shack or somewhere and get a couple of battery alligator clamps, replace the cigarette lighter adapter with those, and use the battery to directly power the compressor

remember when making this mod that you will have to identify the correct polarity of the original design, and maintain that when installing the alligator clamps.

you can often find a ready made adapter to do that for you so you don't have to solder and engineer