Fault finding & fluid fill.

Fortunately one of the electrical faults was easy to find, identifiable by the cracking noise of wires shorting. This came from the column dip/main beam light switch, it looks like a mixture of hot wires and abrasion has damaged the wires up by the switch. To remedy this, I have cut the wires, soldered them back together and sealed it off with heat shrink, though I shall keep an eye out for a replacement one for the future.



In preparation for getting the car drivable, the clutch and brake system has been filled and bled. As both systems are new or have had new seals fitted, eg. brake calipers, there should not be a problem with leaks or seals going, though for some reason I did have to replace one of the rear slave cylinders as it refused to pass fluid through it, not quite sure what was going on there.

GT6 tidy & hook up

Spent a fairly busy weekend on the GT6, cutting and fixing down to length the water lines going to the header tank. At the moment all the lines are in flexible pipe, giving me the option to re position as necessary, in the future I would like to replace much of it with aluminium tube for added protection, but it should do for now.
Much of the wiring around the engine bay has been chopped to length where required and connected up, meaning I should be able to leave a lot of that alone for now until the next round of improvements.

With the number of smaller jobs running down, I decided to try connecting the battery, not something which has been done since the re-wire. I hoped everything would work straight out of the box, but it seems I will have some fault finding to do.
The first and most noticeable problem is something to do with the one of the flasher units, at a guess it would be the hazard, as I have changed the switch and relocated the unit. With the battery connected, the flasher unit is causing the ignition and oil warning light to flash, but no sign of the proper light flashing, though this might be due to blown bulbs or bad contacts, I have not checked this yet.
Also noticeable is the variable nature of some of the light switches, needing a bit of working back and forth to get them to operate, hope I do not have to replace too many switches.

Looks like I might have quite a bit of fault finding to do yet and try to work out where I have gone wrong with my re-wiring.

Project lightweight

Down on the farm where I live/work, my boss has a series III lightweight Land Rover, which he plans to get back on the road after a number of years sat on one of the barns, but re-engining it with a slightly more modern 200 series 2.5tdi engine. Over the years the chassis has been patched and had parts replaced, but one of the reasons it has been laid up recently is due to chassis rot again, this time on the main chassis rail on the topside, under the floor panels.
There are at least two ways of gaining access to this area, removal of the rear body tub and, more simply, removal of the rear floor. Since we are not keen on making too much work for ourselves and the floor is corroding through in places, it was decided to lift the floor panel. This was done in an hour or so after drilling out all of the rivets and carefully prising the panel up. With this panel up the chassis can be cleaned up and decisions made on how much to repair it, just need to wait for some steel to be delivered before I start the welding.




















Meanwhile, the GT6 has been receiving a bit of attention, with some of the smaller jobs being finished off and tidied up. The wiring under the dash is now, hopefully, complete having added a momentary switch for the screen wash pump and connected the inertia switch to the two fuel pump switches.
In the engine bay, the coolant header tank has been sited in what was the battery box, the two lower connections going through holes cut in the bulkhead support panel and the whole lot given extra support with a small bracket underneath the tank.

Polished rocker

Been doing a bit of maintenance for the saloon and preparation for the GT6 by servicing up a couple of sets of rockers for the six cylinder engines. A problem I had been having with the saloon was accurately setting the valve clearances; this was in part due to a slightly worn rocker shaft, but largely due to the worn faces of the rockers.













New rockers are available, but seeing as I had the time and inclination, I decided to service the ones I had. First off the shaft was stripped down and the components left to soak on paraffin for a couple of hours before being scrubbed clean using a wire brush on a drill and any oil ways cleaned through. The ware face was then carefully polished using WD40 on 600 grade glass paper, taking good are to alter the polishing angle as I went along, to maintain the radius on the face.
The rocker assembly was then re-assembled with copious amounts oil on a new rocker shaft.















Back on the saloon after the clearances were set, the valve train sounds a lot quieter now, so a successful job then, which was then proven with a trip over to Carmarthen to have a look at a MkI GT6, the new owner of which has also started a blog.

An Update

There has been a bit of a lull in work on my GT6, partly due to a lack of enthusiasm and partly due to being busy around the farm.
In the meantime, after a bit of deliberation with other people on the DS Forum, I decided to invest in a rivnut tool. This tool allows you to fit a threaded tube into any panel where there is sufficient clearance behind it. The main reason for this purchase was to allow me to neatly route the battery cables from the battery box behind the driver, past the drivers seat and on through the bulkhead to the starter.
One alternative to rivnut was to use self-tapping screws through the panels, but I thought that a bit scruffy to have screws pointing out underneath the car, with a propensity to rust. So instead, aluminium rivnuts with stainless cap head bolts are being used, much better in my opinion.
The battery box needed to be modified to fit in the boot area and still allow the panels to be fitted over it. In order to do this, the box needed to be shortened by six inches, this was simply done by accurately cutting the box in half, sliding one half in the other, decide the correct height, then fix the two pieces back together again using pop rivets and Adhesal.














The more I have been working with the GT6 and it's fuel system, the less happy I have been with the original fuel hose and fittings, these being a mix of mild steel and plastic, especially as it has to carry in excess of 100psi petrol. To improve matters, I have decided to use modern braided fuel hoses to run to and from the metering unit in the engine bay.
The system uses 9/16" (-6 JIC) hose for the feed to the metering unit, requiring an adaptor at the metering unit end to convert from BSP to 9/16" (-6 JIC) and a 30° swept joint to clear the bulkhead.
For the spill back, 7/16" (-4 JIC) is being used, again with a BSP to JIC converter at the metering unit end. I am waiting on this smaller BSP to JIC converter at the moment, seems it is a bit of an unusual size, but once I get it, work can start on laying out the fittings, to decide where best to route the fuel hoses and the lengths required.

Hard at it

After quite a bit of planning, re-planning and swearing, I think I have broken the back of my wiring. The original fuse box has gone, replaced with a multi fuse and relay box. Looks a lot neater now, though I can still see myself re-wiring it again when I change the dash.

In progress















Almost done

Plodding on

The rear half of the wiring loom, from the fuse box back, has been re-covered with the original specification tape after any redundant wires had been removed and any poor quality joints had been re-made. So this section has now been re-threaded into the car and a new twelve way connector has been fitted at the fuse box end to aid quick and easy connection to the rest of the system.
The front interior section of the wiring loom has now been fitted back in the car to check for fit and give me some idea of what length the wire to the additional switches needed to be.

Some thought has gone into the location of the combined fuse and relay box, originally it was going to be fitted in approximately the same place as the original, in the battery box. I have gone off this idea as it puts the relays, fuses and connections in a more harsh environment and would male removal harder. Instead, the box will be mounted on the side of the passenger tray, still perhaps not ideal, but it ought to make routing of wire easier.



As the fuse and relay holders are modular in a carrier, a hole was cut in the side of the parcel tray to accept the holder, with a strengthening plate also fitted around the cutout as the tray is somewhat flimsy even before cutting chunks out of it.






There was a added and unwanted job that appeared over the weekend was that I was longer able to shut the rear hatch.
It had been a bit of a pain to shut and made some grinding noises when moving it, I guessed it was just down to lack of lubrication, so I ended up leaving it down but not latched into position overnight, but it seemed to have moved, with the latch being approx 1/2" out of alignment.
After trying to get it to lign up by slackening off the mounting bolts, I replaced the spring and hinge unit from that side and now is shuts much better than it ever has done before in my ownership. Will have to find some more paint now as I now have one green hinge and one magenta.

As long as no other jobs come up on the car, the next step will be to wire in the fuse and relay box, then see about getting power from the battery to the box, via the starter.