44 LANDROVER MONTHLYOF ALL thetools I us e
to help mekeep old
Land Rovers on the
road, probably the
most important is my
rather battered and oil-
smudged laptop. This
might seem strange,
given that thevehicles I work on aren’t
exactly bristling with the latest electronic
wizardry. Diagnostic por ts? Sur e, a Series
II has those. There are two, at the top
left-hand corner of the instrumentpanel.
One red, one black. Connect a multimeter
across the two and you can find out
whether the chargingsystem is working.
That is about as close as I usuallyget to
plugging avehicle in andreading the
fault codes. What my laptop pr ovides is
ready ac cess to information, and without
the in ternet my job would be very much
more difficult.
Last week Da ve the landlordstuck his
head round theworkshop door. He has
been working on hisSeries III Lightweight
for several months now and it isstarting
to look good. Da ve’s speciality is body-
work: when I neededto 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 theycame back looking
like ne w. He’s not quiteso comfortable
with electrics, and the wiring on the
Lightweight was a tangled mess of extra
wires, Scot chlock connectors andsticky
tape. The vehicle had beenstanding for a
while, and nothingworked. So I got a few
electricaltools toge ther, walked acr oss to
his unit andset to work.
Faced with this kindof job, my first line
of attack is to pull out and discard all the
wiring, switches andrelays that ha ve been
added by previous owners. Almost invari-
ably I find that noneof it actually does
anything useful, and once I amback to
the standard wiring loom, with the usual
British standard colour coding, I can fairly
quickly start to ge t thingsworking again.
On this vehicle a shortsection of the
sidelight wiring hadoverheated and
melted, but therest of the loomwas in
good order and unbutchered. Before too
long I hadeverythingworking except the
windscreen wipers.
From 1968to the endof Defender
production LandRover used the popular
Lucas-ty pe 14W two-speed wiper motor
with built-inpark switch. OnSeries IIAwipers, but the screenwash switch was
broken and had beenreplaced by a toggle
switch. The Series III wiperswitch has
a separate plunger-typeswitch which
screws into the back and is operated
by pushing thecontrol knob. The same
switch was used for the rear wash-wipe
on De fenders until 2006.The screenwash
switch was ne ver available from Land
Rover as a separate part: it could be
obtained direct fromLucas but has been
unavailable for many years. I ha ve come
across a few Series IIIs lately with dead
screenwash switches: it is possible to drill
out the rivets, clean up thecontacts and
reassemble theswitch with tiny nuts and
bolts in placeof the riv ets, but it is alla
bit fiddly.
One lunchtime I decidedto see
whether Icould find a suitablereplace-Bad
advice
and III vehicles thiswas normally wired as
a single-speed motor, althoughtwo-speed
wipers appeared on late Series III County
models.The park switch has fivetermi-
nals on one side(connectingto the wiper
switch via a harness with a multipin plug)
and three on theother (connectingto the
three brushes on the motor). The system
is designedso that when the wipers
are switched off, the motor continues to
receive po wer via thepark switch until the
wiper bladesreach theat-rest position.
On Da ve’s Lightweight the harness was
missing. Being a militaryvehicle there
were only two wir es feeding the motor
via a metal box, which I suspectto be a
radio suppressor: one of these wires was
connected directlyto earth, the other to
the standard rotary Series III wash-wipe
switch. The wipers cleared thescreen but
didn’t self-park.
I could find nothing in theSeries III
workshop manualto te ll me howto
connect the wiper motor to the switch.
I could ha ve looked at anotherSeries III
and worked it all out from the wiringcol-
ours, but I didn’t have a vehicle to hand.
So I went online, and within a minuteI
was lookingat a very clearset of illustra-
tions which showed exactly how thesys-
tem was suppo sed to work. Two minut es
after tha t, with a few lengthsof wire and
some spadeterminals, Dave’s Lightweight
had self-parking wipers. Back in the pre-
internet da ys, solving that problemwould
have taken a lot longer.
Anotherway in whichmy laptop help s
me is by tracking down hard-to-find
spar es. The Ligh tweight might now haveLightweight dashpanel comes outfor wiringrepairsNewscreenwash switchto replace the originalNORFOLKGARAGEWITHRICHARD HALL