No cause for alarm

The Acclaim is currently on SORN for the winter, not because I am worried about taking it out during inclement weather, but mostly because I have too many vehicles on the road and not enough places to go in them! Since I want to tidy up the Acclaim’s body and paint anyway, when its insurance and tax expired, I parked it up in Alan’s barn to await its turn.

There are a couple of things to report though, which happened a little earlier but are only just making it into print. The first concerns a bit of tidying up to the wiring. When I bought the Acclaim, it had already been fitted with an aftermarket alarm by a previous owner. I am very wary of these, finding they are as likely to cause electrical and running faults as they are to stop the car being stolen. I also don’t like to have stray wiring draped here, there and everywhere, plus I didn’t have a key to turn the alarm on and off anyway. One final concern was that it was drawing power when the car was sitting – the siren would beep each time you disconnected and reconnected the battery, and this could act as a parasitic drain. That would not be so much of a problem on a car that is used every day, but it is potentially more of an issue on one that’s part of a ‘fleet’ and used less frequently.

So one Sunday I decided to work my way through all the wiring, returning everything back to standard as I went.

I was aware that this could end up creating starting or running issues where there hadn’t been any before, but really that would have been a bigger concern on a more sophisticated arrangement that included dummy wires and hidden connections. I got the impression with this one that what you saw is what you got.

I started at the back with the key- operated switch. This had two wires running forwards that I had to track under the rear seat, behind the plastic interior sill covers, along the driver’s side and up to just below the fuse box. Along the way, removal of the rear seat base showed the usual Acclaim corrosion on the inner wheelarch by the rear seatbelt mounting points. This was worse on the offside and had been plated, while the nearside was still in one piece – these were added to the list of work to be done in the spring.

In the driver’s footwell by the fuse box, the cables had been spliced into the existing loom using Scotchlok in-line snap

connectors. These are dreadful things that make it easy to join a new wire to the middle of an existing cable with a simple crimp action. That sounds great in theory, but the practice is quite different as it works by pushing an M-shaped blade over the old and new wires, cutting their insulation and bridging from the core of the old wire to the core of the new one alongside it. Unfortunately it is just as likely to cut strands of wire too if the size is not a perfect match, and creates a weak point.

I carefully prised these connectors open and pulled the blades out to separate the wires. The alarm wires were being discarded, but the car’s loom wires needed careful inspection. In this case the metal strands did not appear too badly damaged, so I wrapped each wire with insulating tape to repair the damage, then taped them all together to stop those smaller strips of tape from unwinding.

There was also another set of cables that were clearly non- original, and these ended in a terminal strip connector that I always remember being referred to as the chocolate box type. Tracing this forward and back showed that it was in fact a separate security fitting that put a secret switch in the ignition coil circuit. I would have left this in situ, but had already started dismantling it, so carried on. Thinking about it, this switch could have caused me to pull my hair out if I’d accidentally knocked it off and didn’t know anything about it. I don’t think that bypassing it would have been too difficult for anybody who knows how to hot wire a car anyway.

Pulling all the wires through into the engine bay, that just left the alarm siren and control box to remove from the nearside inner wing, plus a couple of earth points. Then, with the battery reconnected (and no beep from the siren!), I was relieved to find that the car fired up instantly and settled to a smooth idle.

ABOVE: When the back of the switch was viewed from inside the boot, it was clearly a simple two-wire switch with crimped terminals. Tracing those wires forwards...

ABOVE: This key-operated switch under the offside rear light on the Acclaim was connected up to an aftermarket alarm. Unfortunately, no key for it was included with the car.

ABOVE: ...led to this nest of Scotchlok wire-to-wire quick splice connectors. It is not actually necessary to know what each wire does, though a wiring diagram would soon explain this.

ABOVE: Simon also found this ON/OFF switch that had been added by the fuse box. This turned out to be an ignition cut-off security device, but it was already too late to retain it by the time he figured this out.

ABOVE: You can then discard the wires for the alarm (the ones that start at the terminal) and repair the insulation that will have been damaged on the Triumph wiring.

ABOVE: That’s because if you prise the plastic housing open, then you can extract this M-shaped blade, which effectively cuts the insulation on any wires placed inside.

ABOVE: The only other item left to be removed was the alarm siren, the electronic control box and their wiring, which had been fixed in the engine bay to the nearside inner wing.

ABOVE: This section of wiring was traced forwards from the switch to the coil, and clearly the switch had been wired into the low -tension circuit to act as a hidden breaker.

ABOVE: The wires from the switch led to this terminal strip connector. The screw clamps work well enough on solid singlestrand cables, but tend to cut into multi-strand vehicle wiring.