I think I'm going mad - 1959 Series II rewiring

[Grizzly_Adams]

Well I went and had a good look at Molly's wiring today. She's got a heap of dials (most of which are working) and a heap of switches, so far I've only been able to figure out that one of the switches supposedly tells me the amount of fuel I have in one of my tanks.

I'm sure another one is probably for the spottie, but I haven't been succesful in getting that to work yet

Lately though her brakes lights have been on constantly when the engine is running, so I thought I had a short. Turns out it was just the sensor on the brake pedal - nothing a good coating of WD40 couldn't fix

But the wiring has me all confused. Somebody has gone to a lot of work on her but gave up about 90% of the way. All of the main wiring looks newish, nice and plastic coated - except for the too hard to reach bits like into the back of the lights, they're still got bits of very very very old degraded cotton insulation on them... and the joins! Connectors to connectors, just so they didn't have to take out the cotton insulated wire near the headlights. Sheesh.

Some of the "improvements" that have been made to her are as follows:

- negative earth! I thought (and I've confirmed with a wiring diagram) that she was suppose to be positive earth.. I guess someone changed her over.

- relay in for the headlights

- relay in for the spottie

- alternator! I thought this era would have had a generator. She's certainly got a huge resistor on the side of the engine bay, but it's attached to nothing but itself?

- Relay (I think) between the alternator and main wiring harness

- fuse box in the engine bay, if only I could read what the fuses were suppose to be...

So at first I thought I'd figure out where the switches were going. After staring blankly at them for the first hour I figured the best I could do was go down the shop and pick up an entire new set of switches with plugs in the back and replace these ones as these ones have the cables soldered directly onto them.

So then I fixed a gauge or two and started investigating the rear lights that wouldn't turn off.

Couldn't get the main beams to work could I? Not high beam OR dipped beam.. but then the parkers worked when I twiddled the switch a bit, must be a loose wire I guess. Still no main beam though.

Anyway I started tracing cables and found a trailer plug - well actually I found a heap of cables all electrical taped up underneath the back, and a trailer plug in one of the compartments in the back wheel well. They both connected up fine so I left them connected. They share the same cables as the rear brake / tail / reverse lights and personally I would like to rip them out and rewire them but the wires go through the chassis so it makes it difficult to trace, to say the least They disappear into the chassis near the rear drivers corner and reappear someone underneath but I couldn't find nor see exactly where.

I also found a reversing light that had nothing in it except a wire taped up with electrical tape. Unfortunately I dropped the glass and it shattered Not a happy jan.

After finally giving up and putting her away I thought I'd try the lights one more time.. hey, high beam works.. lets try dipped beam - nope, still no go... so give her the old faithful THUMP above the lights and wow at least one of them works on dipped beam now Guess the other one might actually be stuffed, but still no go with the parkers *sigh* Anyways intermittent isn't good enough so I'm gonna have to rewire her lights anyway - but that's a task for another time because I think that'll take me more than a day and I can't move her onto the concrete if she's going to be there more than a day

Still a long day and more questions raised then answered

[jx2mad]

Many years back I was up the central coast of NSW in my 2a 2 door rover towing a very old campervan. Due to extremely bad weather we decided to come home. Pulling in for fuel I found that I had no rear lights on the rover and no lights on the van. It was starting to get dark and it was pouring down. There was about 2 inches of water on the ground through the servo. I couldnt go anywhere so I rang the NRMA and had to cwait 11/2 hre for them. He pulled up alongside and asked what the problem was. I told hib but he didnt have a clue as to what to do. So i sais I wanted a roll of hookup wire and a roll of tape. He tossed them to me and took off. In the meantime I had unscrewed the dash and so I hooked up the wire to a live terminal, threw it across the load, opened the lift up tailgate leaned over and screwed it into the numberplate lamp .Hey, all the lights worked. Never did find the broken connection just ran a new wire from the dash to the rear. Why didnt I buy the wire and tape? Ran out of money filling the tank.

[paulthepilot_5]

Ha HA, the joys of Landy electrical systems. I just recently re-wired my instrument pannel in my series 3, boy what a job. When you do any wiring in her, make sure you use solder conectors, metal crimp connectors work really well too if you solder the end of the wire in as well. Also invest in cheap labeling machine, so you can label the end of each wire, it is alot easier that trying to shop around for 20 different collours of wire!

[JDNSW]

Sounds like you have a bit of a problem, but it should be possible to nut it out if you go at it logically - I find in these circumstances that labelling each wire as you figure out what it does is worthwhile. (a couple of inches of masking tape and a biro)

The "relay" attached to the alternator is probably an external regulator - mine has that.

Re your lights - problems with these are often earths. Check where the lights are actually earthed, and that they really are earthed. Mine were earthed to the radiator support panel - but it was not electrically connected to the chassis! Fixed that with a earth strap directly from the negative of the battery to the panel.

Most Landrovers of that vintage have been converted to negative earth because they have had alternators installed and/or to run negative earth electronic equipment.

John