Norfolk Garage
Why Richard Hall’s best tool is his laptop
OF ALL the tools I use to help me keep old Land Rovers on the road, probably the most important is my rather battered and oilsmudged laptop. This might seem strange, given that the vehicles I work on aren’t exactly bristling with the latest electronic wizardry. Diagnostic ports? Sure, a Series II has those. There are two, at the top left-hand corner of the instrument panel. One red, one black. Connect a multimeter across the two and you can find out whether the charging system is working. That is about as close as I usually get to plugging a vehicle in and reading the fault codes. What my laptop provides is ready access to information, and without the internet my job would be very much more difficult.
Last week Dave the landlord stuck his head round the workshop door. He has been working on his Series III Lightweight for several months now and it is starting to look good. Dave’s speciality is bodywork: when I needed to do some fiddly repairs to a pair of ultra-rare one-piece doors for an early Series II I handed them over to him and they came back looking like new. He’s not quite so comfortable with electrics, and the wiring on the Lightweight was a tangled mess of extra wires, Scotchlock connectors and sticky tape. The vehicle had been standing for a while, and nothing worked. So I got a few electrical tools together, walked across to his unit and set to work.
Faced with this kind of job, my first line of attack is to pull out and discard all the wiring, switches and relays that have been added by previous owners. Almost invariably I find that none of it actually does anything useful, and once I am back to the standard wiring loom, with the usual British standard colour coding, I can fairly quickly start to get things working again. On this vehicle a short section of the sidelight wiring had overheated and melted, but the rest of the loom was in good order and unbutchered. Before too long I had everything working except the windscreen wipers.
From 1968 to the end of Defender production Land Rover used the popular Lucas-type 14W two-speed wiper motor with built-in park switch. On Series IIA
and III vehicles this was normally wired as a single-speed motor, although two-speed wipers appeared on late Series III County models. The park switch has five terminals on one side (connecting to the wiper switch via a harness with a multipin plug) and three on the other (connecting to the three brushes on the motor). The system is designed so that when the wipers are switched off, the motor continues to receive power via the park switch until the wiper blades reach the at-rest position. On Dave’s Lightweight the harness was missing. Being a military vehicle there were only two wires feeding the motor via a metal box, which I suspect to be a radio suppressor: one of these wires was connected directly to earth, the other to the standard rotary Series III wash-wipe switch. The wipers cleared the screen but didn’t self-park.
I could find nothing in the Series III workshop manual to tell me how to connect the wiper motor to the switch. I could have looked at another Series III and worked it all out from the wiring colours, but I didn’t have a vehicle to hand. So I went online, and within a minute I was looking at a very clear set of illustrations which showed exactly how the system was supposed to work. Two minutes after that, with a few lengths of wire and some spade terminals, Dave’s Lightweight had self-parking wipers. Back in the preinternet days, solving that problem would have taken a lot longer.
Another way in which my laptop helps me is by tracking down hard-to-find spares. The Lightweight might now have wipers, but the screenwash switch was broken and had been replaced by a toggle switch. The Series III wiper switch has a separate plunger-type switch which screws into the back and is operated by pushing the control knob. The same switch was used for the rear wash-wipe on Defenders until 2006. The screenwash switch was never available from Land Rover as a separate part: it could be obtained direct from Lucas but has been unavailable for many years. I have come across a few Series IIIS lately with dead screenwash switches: it is possible to drill out the rivets, clean up the contacts and reassemble the switch with tiny nuts and bolts in place of the rivets, but it is all a bit fiddly.
One lunchtime I decided to see whether I could find a suitable replace
ment screenwash switch for the obsolete Lucas one. Again the Internet made this task far easier than it would once have been. Within a few minutes I had found a switch which looked almost identical to the original. I emailed the company who sent me a sample – it needed the thread recutting so that it would screw in, but in all other respects it was perfect. I ordered a die nut online, recut the thread on the switch (plastic body, so not exactly difficult), screwed it into the back of a Series III wiper switch and it worked exactly as the original. It even had the same type of screw terminals in the same positions. So I ordered 100 switches, listed them in my ebay shop, and another small gap in the availability of parts for classic Land Rovers has now been filled. That first sample switch was installed in Dave’s Lightweight. Would any of this even have been possible without the internet? It would certainly have been much harder.
There is however a dark side to the internet. To be blunt, it makes it far too easy for idiots to communicate with the outside world. Once upon a time, if you wanted to pass on incorrect and unhelpful technical advice you either had to wait to be asked, or actively seek out someone stupid enough to listen to you. Now you can just post your wrong information on the internet where it might potentially be seen by millions of people. Joking aside, there is a very real problem here. I don’t hang around on Land Rover forums and online discussion groups much, mainly because I already have more than enough random strangers ringing me up at work looking for free advice (“Just wondering if I could pick your brains for a minute”). But I follow a couple of Facebook groups, and one Sunday morning I was idly browsing through one of them when something caught my eye.
A novice Series IIA owner was trying to replace the rear brake shoes on an 88 inch and had posted a request for advice on how the return springs should be fitted. By the time I saw the post, one person had given him the correct answer and four had replied with information that was not only incorrect but potentially lethal. I couldn’t really let that one pass by, so I put together a post explaining not only where the springs should go but also why they needed to be fitted in that particular way. I find that if I understand how something works I’m less likely to assemble it incorrectly, and I doubt if I’m alone in thinking that way. I also very politely requested that people refrain from giving technical advice on a braking system that they were unfamiliar with as their wellmeaning help could get someone killed.
The response? Quite a few ‘likes’, and another four group members telling the Series IIA owner how to assemble his brakes in such a way that they wouldn’t work properly and might result in a nasty accident. See what I mean about idiots? To be fair, the ten-inch drum brake fitted to every short wheelbase Land Rover from 1948 to 1993 is a slightly unusual beast. The trailing shoe is designed to be free-floating so that it self-adjusts, being held in very light contact with the drum by a spring inside the brake cylinder. The leading shoe has a snail-cam adjuster and return spring. On car-type drum brakes, almost invariably the top return spring goes between the two shoes, with provision for adjustment (whether manual or self-adjusting) at the bottom. This is the advice people were giving the Series IIA owner.
If you put a return spring across the top of the two shoes on a Land Rover ten-inch drum brake, it will pull the piston for the trailing shoe right back into the cylinder, and the shoe will no longer be able to self-adjust. You’ll probably get away with it on new shoes and drums, but as soon as the shoes get a bit of wear into them, you will find that the brake pedal goes almost to the floor before the brakes start to do anything. There is a spring attachment post on the backplate below the cylinder: the top spring should hook round the adjuster post on the back of the leading shoe, long end forward, pass between the adjuster and the backplate, then hook round the attachment post on the backplate. I have seen a few Series vehicles over the years with the top spring attached across the two shoes: it is a common enough error already without having it spread far and wide on social media. Happily, if you type “Land Rover Series brake springs” into Google Images, you get half a dozen pictures showing you the correct way to put these brakes together. The internet contains both good and bad information, so don’t just go with the first thing you read.