Saturday 23 December 2017

Elecktrikery




Time to have another go at the electrics, I thought.


The original design had the fuses for the back end located neatly Out-Of-The-Way in one of the stowage bins. So neatly OOTW, in fact, that they were damned difficult to get to if Elly was loaded. Added to that the Masterpiece of Design that now allows us to move the Engel fridge OOTW neatly denies access to them. Rather than risking a hernia trying to move a fridge full of booze and other cold essentials, the fuses had to be moved.


 This entailed removing the passenger seat, so we did a few little modifications to the fixings for that, so we could get easier access to the battery box....more of that later,

The fuse box has now been moved from the back of the bulkhead to the front. While this reduces the rearward travel of the seat by a tiny bit, the ease of access more than makes up for that. While the seat was out, another 12v socket was added to make life a bit easier under the awning.
The socket is supposed to be waterproof and it might well be, but the cover doesn't seem to be a close enough fit to keep water out, so we'll see how it performs - Amazon, standby for a complaint if it corrodes. Anyway, I took the time to label all the wires in the battery box with plastic discs or bits of tape to make tracing faults a bit easier in future. I suppose I should really make up some kind of diagram to show where all the wires are going, but for the moment the photos will do.

The biggest pain if you fit seats that don't have removeable squabs - and that's the vast majority of after-market seats for a Defender -is that access to the battery becomes impossible unless you take the whole seat out. This is a nuisance. We had a think about our arrangements and, by slightly modifying the front fixings the seat can be tilted backwards just enough to get useful access to the batteries.





I wouldn't recommend this arrangement for any complex work, but to disconnect the batteries for maintenance it'll work well enough. With this in mind I disconnected the main battery prior to trying to replace the standard 65A alternator with our spare 100A unit. Unfortunately I couldn't get the bolts undone! I dunno why they're so stiff but the effort needed to shift them was beginning to round off the bolt head on the upper bolt and the lower one wouldn't move at all. Rather than risking sheared bolts or knackered heads I replaced all the wires and retreated. We'll have a re-think on this one later.

With the electrics disconnected, though, we had a re-jig of the dashboard.




The new-look office
Gone is the "eye-level" binnacle. Everything has been moved one level down since the altimeter that was in the middle level didn't work particularly well. This clears the top of the dash and I've put the ashtray back where it came from but modified it to be the mount for the OSM- and Tripmeter tablet. 

The ashtray with a mounting plate installed













..and a backing plate to hold a small tablet

The backing plate is the one we made previously that hangs from the mirror mounting. Used this new way it can be road-legal and might mean we can get rid of the Garmin for some of the time. The Garmin is still quite useful for Olaf routes though, so we won't get rid of it completely.




The "horns" don't need to be this big so they'll be trimmed off eventually, although often when I do things like that I find that I could've found another use for the thing I've just cut up - if I hadn't been so quick with the saw. 
The ammeter still hasn't been wired in since the LEDs on the T-Max system (the blackbox-with-yellow-writing) give me as much info as I need regarding the charging process. It fills an otherwise gaping hole- like the CHT gauge -  but I'm thinking of putting something more useful in its place, maybe an oil pressure gauge. An electrical one will be fairly easy (hah!) to fit and be a bit more useful. 

The move wasn't straightforward, of course, given that it involved disconnecting, re-routing and reconnecting wires but I only blew one fuse and everything works as before. I think....

The angled mounting for the gauges lets me see the faces very easily but I think I'll have to put some kind of blanking plate over the top and maybe underneath to stop stray light leaking out.

The front work light is now, at last, wired in. I debated whether to route the wiring via a relay but as it only draws a few amps I've run the power straight through the switch. It doesn't look very bright, though.








Finally, we got around to applying some of the stickers that people in the trade very kindly donated. A big Thank You to:





and
 for their support for our 2018 plans. 
We've got quite a lot of new kit on Elly and a lot of it has come from the suppliers mentioned above.

Friday 15 December 2017

Something's still dripping...

...and it's not melting snow.


The fuel tank leak is now top of the list for fixing and we've been running the fuel level down to almost nothing to make dropping the tank a bit easier. With all the required spare parts delivered the stage was set, then this arrived:




The view from the kitchen window suggested that this was NOT the time to be taking Elly off the road! Given that the only reason we bought a Landrover in the first place was to cope a little better with the Highland Winter snow, it seemed a bad idea to be without one now it was back.


The weather improved a bit towards the end of the week so, with a lot of care and help from Ian Watt's guys, we took the tank out...



It was almost empty and actually nowhere near as heavy as I was expecting it to be. With hindsight I could've got it out myself easily enough but the reason I didn't try was 1. the lack of decent access underneath and 2. if it had turned out to be too heavy for me to handle alone, I'd have been in a bit of a jam. I didn't fancy being trapped underneath it, trying to stop it ripping free and yelling for help that wasn't going to arrive....the garage is quite a way from the kitchen!

So, it went to the garage - and a proper ramp - to be removed. The jetwashing I'd given it to get the crud off before we took it out has succeeded in removing most of the original paint. The bare metal doesn't seem to have had any primer on it, so no surprise that it just washed off in sheets. What was a surprise was how clean the steel was underneath. In fact, not a spot of rust at all - it looked, once I'd cleaned off the rest of the old paint, like polished aluminium and probably weighed about the same, too.








The old fuel return pipe was leaking from 2 places - around the seal...





...where 2 of the fixing screws had been stripped and were basically just resting in the holes. I fitted a new seal and pipe. The old pipe was probably OK but as we were there it made no sense to refit the old one.





The vent pipe - if that what it was for - is redundant and had been "closed" with another of PITA's bodges - see the post from last summer - so we replaced our "field fix" with the proper seals.





A coat of cold galvanising primer finished the prep...






and the last job was to refit the fuel sender unit. Now, a confession...I hadn't really inspected this bit of the pipework too closely. I thought I'd found all the bodges when we removed this masterpiece of engineering from the bottom of the tank:


It's fuzzy because I was laughing too much. All the fuel hoses turned out, once we'd got them off the fittings, to be too small for the pipes that they were meant to fit. Unfortunately I hadn't noticed that the correct nuts, back nuts and olive had been removed from the sender unit and a bit of rubber pipe substituted, clamped on with a Jubilee clip. This clip was rusted solid and the attempts to free it saw the IW fitters break the pipe on the sender. With hindsight, we should've just cut the hose away. It being Friday afternoon, there was no way we were going to get a replacement sender much before the middle of the following week, so I decided to try to fix the broken one.


The remains of the broken plastic pipe can be prised out of the connector
I drilled out the old fitting with an 8mm bit having pulled out the pickup pipe. This pipe has a tiny O-ring on it, so I was able to push the pipe through the new hole and it still sealed fairly well. With enough pipe sticking through to fix the fuel hose onto, I filled the fitting with JB Weld. 

The pickup pipe pushed through the internal sleeve and bonded in place
 Putting it all back together was easy enough having given the tank a coat of black paint and some underbody sealant on the vulnerable front face. Now we come to the reason for all this work....

The serial number on the hose gives away its proper use.




This is a 120mm length of Camping Gaz hose. It happens to be almost the correct internal diameter to fit onto the fuel return pipe on the top of the tank, which is presumably why PITA chose to use it instead of spending about 5 pence on a length of the correct fuel hose. The little Jubilee clip wasn't done up tightly enough to crush the hose - a bit too big (unlike all the other bloody hoses we've changed which were too small) - onto the pipe. The hose was so loose it just pulled off. Added to that the material it was made from isn't designed to carry diesel fuel so has gone harder than bone. Not only did the whole setup leak whenever the long-range tank had fuel in it, the drips blew back along the tank to the back, collecting dirt as they went and plastering the bottom of the tank with filthy, smelly crud. After a while the whole back end stank of fuel. The leak only stopped when the level of fuel in the LR tank dropped to zero since it was now below the level of the return pipe. 3 days and a lot of effort and money to repair this silly bodge......

The "new" tank has had all the areas that are likely to leak or need monitoring moved to more accessible positions, so any future work hopefully can be done without having to dismantle half the back end of the vehicle. Another lesson learned.