Back at ya

Some good news on the electrical front - the reversing light switch and all the wiring as far as the rear loom is present and correct. The switch is on the top left of the R380 box with two green-brown (GN) wires seen here through the access cover under the middle seat. [The white-yellow (WY) wire is for the handbrake indicator switch.] In the rear loom, there's a pair of GN wires terminating in a female bullet connector on each side of the vehicle. I think the usual layout is a single fog lamp on the driver's side and a single reverse lamp on the passenger side. Mine already has fogs on both sides, and rather than convert one I just added a generic backup light, fed a new wire through the existing grommet, and crimped a bullet connector on. Done and done.

Since freeing up the lever the heater blower also works!

Instrument panel

To get at the blower control lever, I needed to pull off the instrument panel. Conveniently, there are only 4 simple retaining screws. Less conveniently, the speedo cable prevents the panel from moving more than about 1.5" (just enough to get my - fairly small - hand behind). Neither the Haynes nor the Brooklands manual say how to disconnect the speedo (Haynes just says "disconnect the speedometer cable"; Brooklands has the positively loquacious "if necessary, disconnect the speedometer cable").
After some experimenting I was able to master the correct ninja death grip necessary to pop the cable housing: note that you need to squeeze the big ring right where the cable enters the dial not the two raised bridges further back on the connector housing.

With the speedo cable off, you can work the panel around and down below the steering column. Once in there I found a few mystery wires:

• brown yellow (NY) and brown-white (NW) wires from one of the 'spare' lamp locations beyond the glow plug indicator going down towards the hazard/fog switch panel. NW appears to have a resistor inline
• brown-white (NW) ending in an unterminated butt connector
• two green-black or green-slate joining in a free male spade connector

I couldn't see anything obviously amiss with the oil temp gauge (which seems not to work) but I found a broken-off lamp housing on the water temp gauge. The green lens cover had snapped and partly fallen into the gauge housing. After some fishing around with circlip pliers I was able to haul the bottom part up and tack it back onto the inside of the housing with a smear of cyanoacrillate. I then built the whole thing up and attached the top part with epoxy.

Four candles... 'andles for forks

The door handles and locks were all crudely painted over when I got her. I removed the latch mechanisms to clean them up and fit new lock barrels. The latches appear to have some kind of plating (possibly nickel?) - by the time I'd got them cleaned up, the plating was more or less gone, so I gave the outside faces a couple of coats of grey primer to prevent further corrosion.

If you have the current key, then removing the barrels is simple. They are held in by a sprung pin, and there is an access hole in the lock to push the pin back and withdraw the barrel. For the door latches, the pin aligns with the access hole when the key is in the locked position. Note that on this particular latch, an extra hole had been drilled in the 12 o'clock position - presumably by someone trying to pop the barrel without having the correct key. While I was at it, I disassembled the steering column surround and changed the ignition switch barrel too - that one aligns in the OFF position and does not need to be turned with the key in order to remove it.

Give me a lever long enough

The Defender's heater and blower controls are cable-operated. Two cables go to the heater/blower unit and control the flaps for (i) temperature (i.e. how much air is directed through the heater matrix) and (ii) amount of air flow (including a two-position switch for the blower fan). A third cable routes through the dash to control the flappers that direct the air up to the windscreen or down to the footwell. The temperature and up/down controls are on the outboard side of the instrument panel, and the air volume/fan switch is on the inside. Note that it's 'outboard' and 'inboard' not 'left' and 'right' - the controls are different between LHD and RHD models.
Unfortunately all three of the TUM's had become seized. More unfortunately someone had tried to free them by brute force. The levers are puny mild steel pieces which neck down alarmingly: two were bent out of shape and the third was work-fractured almost to the point of failure and soon broke right off.
I decided to have a go at mending the broken lever. First, I used a regular 2-part epoxy ('JB Weld') to tack the joint: it was not a clean break so it needed a good blob of the stuff. I rubber-banded the broken piece to the sound lever to make a kind of jig. Once that had cured overnight, I built up the surrounding area using a steel-loaded epoxy. This comes in a kind of sausage roll of epoxy + hardener: you cut off a slice, work the components together, and then work it into place. It is quite dry - roughly the consistency of glazier's putty. Once that had set, I turned the assembly over, moved the other lever out of the way, and built up the reverse side.
Once both sides were cured, I tidied up the epoxy with a file and gave 'er a couple of coats of semi-gloss black Tremclad. Let's see how long she holds up - really I think that brazing would be a better fix, but I don't have the kit.

It's the volts that jolts

Unlike the older 'Series' FFRs (which were 24V throughout) the Defender FFRs are dual 12/24V. What this means is that they have a regular 12V alternator and underseat battery for all the basic vehicle systems (lamps, blower etc.) and a separate 24V system for the radio equipment. The radio batteries fit under the operator's table in the back of the vehicle.
The 24V generator sits roughly where the aircon would be on a late civilian Defender and has its own drive belt. I removed it to get access to the injector pump. The close-up shows the generator and mounting bracket on the bench. It's a big beast, as you can see - rated at 90A at 28V . The long threaded rod is the adjuster for the belt tension (the bracket is shown sideways in the pic).

The safety dance

Here's a list of things I'm going to need to fix to get my Ontario Safety Standards Certificate and get registered for road use:

• the smoking - obviously it won't pass emissions like that
• horn - it's intermittent (electrically OK but the diaphragm seems to be rusted up) - and a couple of bulbs
  
• some sharp tears in the bodywork that I probably need to hammer down
• heater/blower controls seized up

Depending on interpretation I may need to fit a reversing light - the military vehicles were spec'd without the reverse switch (I guess they never retreat!) although the gearbox has the necessary hole. The Ontario Highway Traffic Act refers to 'prescribed lamps' that need to be in working order but doesn't define them. I've spoken to a few folks who say the rule is just that any light that's originally fitted needs to work.

I also need to figure something out for the spare wheel - I have half the fixings I need to mount it on the bonnet as God intended, and half the fixings I'd need to mount it Chelsea-style on the rear door.

Smokey the TUM

Meet SMOKEY... s/he's an ex-military Land Rover. In civilian life s/he'd be called a Defender 110 but to Her Britannic Majesty's finest s/he's a TRUCK UTILITY MEDIUM FFR PLAIN HARD TOP 12/24V 4X4 DEFENDER 110.
The FFR designation means s/he was Fitted For Radio. I intend to fix 'er up and fit 'er for FUN.

Oh... and yes, s/he's a diesel. But that's no excuse for the James Bond smokescreen.