Modern tech isn’t always bad...
The other day I dropped into a local Land Rover specialist which deals mainly in the more modern end of the Land Rover spectrum, and had a chat with one of the mechanics there who I have known for ages. He was telling me all about the problems he has been having with the electrically-operated steering column locks on L322 Range Rovers and as so often I found myself thinking, “I’m glad I only work on the oldies”.
It’s not that I am uncomfortable with electrics: I can fit a new wiring loom into a Series III without having to refer to a wiring diagram, and the standard Lucas colour codes for vehicle wiring are etched into my soul. But some of the electrical complexities of modern vehicles seems pointless and counter-productive to me.
Not long ago I hired a car on holiday. It was an automatic with an electrically -operated parking brake. I needed to reverse into a small parking bay marked out with boulders. I opened the door to give me a better view of the wheels in relation to the boulders as I reversed. The car responded by disengaging drive and applying the handbrake. Clearly the designers have never lived in the countryside.
It is very easy to become overly nostalgic about the good old days and disparage all these modern innovations, but I think we tend to take for granted all the stuff which makes our lives better. Electronic fuel injection, for example. I remember back in the early 1990s, people (including me) were gloomily predicting that cars would henceforth be impossible to repair, and would be thrown away after six years when the electronics packed up. What actually happened was that cars became more reliable. It is a long time since I had to fiddle around with a choke control on anything other than a Series Land Rover, and I can’t say that I miss the experience. My Golf GTI is now 18 years old and starts first time, hot or cold, without any messing around. The same can be said for electronic ignition.
Most of my working days are spent much as a mechanic would have spent them 30 or 40 years ago, messing around with spanners, sockets and 2 lb lump hammers. Plug-in diagnostics? Well, I sometimes stick the multimeter probes into the power sockets on the dashboard to check the charging system voltage. However, I am very happy to make use of modern technology where appropriate. The internet has transformed the art of running a small garage. If I come across a fault I have not seen before I can Google it. I can track down and order rare parts with a few mouse clicks and have them delivered the next day. Wiring diagram for a NATO towing socket on a One Ten? I can print it out in seconds, in full colour. I cannot really imagine running the business without the web to help me.
Recently I have started to take this process a stage further. Small machine shops and metal profilers have also found their business transformed by modern technology, and in particular by computer aided design (CAD) software. It is now possible to design a custom-made part on screen and email it to the manufacturer, who feeds the drawing into the machine and hits the big green go button, the result being an exact reproduction of the drawing in solid metal (or plastic). 3D printing of plastic components is still at an early stage of development but holds much promise for small plastic items (such as Series II heater control knobs), which are almost impossible to reproduce in small quantities by traditional means.
I mentioned a few months ago that I was considering having some fuel pump spacers made up. To recap, the lift pump on Tdi engines (and pre-tdi diesels with the cast aluminium lift pump mounting plate) sits around 5 mm closer to the camshaft than is ideal. This stresses the linkage between the operating arm and the diaphragm, and also prevents the
priming lever from operating properly. As an interim measure I have been using the 10 mm thick spacer supplied with the conversion fuel pump kit (STC1190), which is intended for fitting the later sealed-for-life pump in place of the old-style AC Delco one (although I cannot imagine why anyone would want to do such a thing). Ten mil is a bit on the thick side, and although the pump will work I suspect it is not delivering quite as much fuel flow as it should.
Over a two-week period around Christmas I had three Tdi-engined vehicles come into the workshop with broken lift pumps. All had failed in the same way, with a broken link between the inner end of the arm and the diaphragm rod. As I have mentioned before, a 200 or 300Tdi will continue to run with a broken lift pump until you show it a steep hill, but running the injection pump on a starvation diet for long periods is unlikely to be good for it. And even with the lift pump working, it is a nuisance to change the fuel filter and then have to turn the crankshaft by hand until you find the one sweet spot where the priming lever actually does something useful rather than just waggling about.
So my New Year’s resolution was to have some spacers made up. When I am not working on old Land Rovers I spend some of my spare time building unfeasibly small model locomotives, and I have been playing around with a CAD software package with a view to having some etched brass components made up to my own design. It did not take me too long to draw up a pump spacer on the screen. I printed out my drawing full-size, cut it out and fitted it to a spare pump mounting plate to check that I had got the dimensions right. I then emailed the drawing to several local laser cutting firms asking for quotes, and a few days later a man turned up at the Norfolk Garage with a box full of crisp, shiny laser-cut aluminium pump spacers. There is something deeply satisfying about seeing something you have designed yourself translated into metal.