We had snow from Thursday to Saturday, it was great fun and caused no end of chaos on the roads.
Snow weekend
Heater Blower housing
Used the 4 inch with wire wheel to start cleaning up the rusty housing, it’s not so bad, there is good metal in places. I think I am going to replace a good chunk of the area that rusted away. Probably replace a full quarter segment of the housing.
Arduino build complete
That’s the Land Rover running and fully functional again. Now onto the next jobs, the list starts with:
- Heater Blower housing repair
- Remainder of Dash
- Windscreen wiper limit switch or park position
- New seat back
- New seat base
- Disk brake conversion
- Galvanised chassis
- endless list starts here..
Fuse block and dash
I have now made up the dash front/lower part and also the right hand end that houses the fuses.
It just needs bolting in and livening up. Then the Land Rover is fully functional once more.
Arduino in
Today I fitted the Arduino on the new aluminium back plate to the land rover. It’s wired up enough to run the Arduino and proved the power supply, but no IO are wired in yet.
Next job is to mount the fuses on a piece of aluminium that I can now start to design.
Arduino almost ready
I think that short of the fuse block it’s re-mounted and ready to go back in. The fuse block will go on another piece of the dash.
The Powerspark points:
Powerspark update
Powerspark received and tested my broken electronic ignition module, they suggested that it might have suffered from premature failure. They’ve put a new one in the post to me at no cost. Wonderful, they’ve been brilliant really. I would been a little miffed if they’d made me buy a new part given that it failed at less than a year old, but then again they can’t be 100% that it’s not something to do with my non standard setup. Who knows. Time will likely tell and I shall carry a spare set of points and condenser just in case!
I have started the move of the Arduino to behind the dash. I ripped everything out of the old mounting box that I had it in and have mounted it onto an aluminium panel that fits around the steering column and will carry the new dash surround.
I have yet to mount the fuses. They will likely be to the right of the Arduino set up on the panel that is not made yet, so that they’re accessible.
Powerspark
I emailed Powerspark about their component that failed, I was mildly upset, as I had deliberably fitted this part to avoid this very issue. The owner of the business replied on New Years eve! I was impressed by that, they’ve since helped me do a little failt finding and asked me to return the part for testing.
Powerspark failed at Broxhead
I went to the TV4x4 event at Broxhead on Sunday 30th. It wa a great trip down open top in the cold. The event was very well attended with about 50, plus or munis 25 cars driving around. I was able to resuce one fella who got grounded out, great fun until my truck packed up. Some nice gent in a disco gave me a hand and helped diagnose the issue, no spark..
Some other nice fella in a fake Camel Trophy disco towed me to the start where Rob and I had another look and concluded that the AA were the best bet.
The AA man conculuded that there was no switching happening and since it’s an electronic gizmo, nothing he could do to get me running, so they sent for a falt bed to take me home in the warm and confort of a heated cab!
Calcs and tyre pressure
Was thinking about buying a tyre pump for the car/land rover. This is because Sainsbury’s have started to charge at the tyre pump. Then I was thinking that those pumps they sell for car tyres are particularly rubbish and probably very very slow. It occurred to me that I could use a 240V pump to pressurise a cylinder to a high pressure then use this to inflate tyres.
So speaking with a friend who does scuba diving, there are cylinders available that are 3 litres and will carry that pressure.