Whilst removing the various bits of interior, vast reams of wiring become visible. It would be nearly impossible to decipher what the wiring is for if I just disconnected the cables whilst removing the whole interior and then the wiring. You would have the devils own job of sorting out the resultant giant mess of spaghetti. The only sensible thing to do is label it as you remove the electrical gubbins. I settled on the tried and tested method of writing on masking tape. I also wrapped coloured insulation tape around the wires so I know which wires I want to keep and which to cut out. Red means cut out.
White means keep.
At least I will know which wires to remove, or more accurately which wires I will not need should the labels get ripped off during removal. However, It is nice to know what you are cutting out, so I will try my hardest to not rip any masking tape tags off.
So, a quick reminder of what the interior looks like:
As you can see, plenty of wires everywhere. All labelled and ready to be removed (hopefully). The first port of call is, if you haven’t done so already (which you should’ve done) is to remove the battery. Then cut every tie-wrap and every pop-in connector that you can find holding wires to the car. Then methodically work the wires from the extremities of the car into the centre of the car.
I started at the rear of the car. I unplugged the rear indicators and fog lights from under the rear bumper, and pushed the plugs through the boot floor into the cabin. Whilst underneath the bumper I also disconnected the trailer electrics and the fuel filler earth and pushed them through into the car. I then moved into the car, where I disconnected the rear light clusters, the rear door, the radio antenna, speakers and all the earth cables that were bolted to the body. With all the cables free I bundled them into the centre of the car:
From under the bonnet: fuel pump emergency cut off, headlights, side lights, indicators, side repeaters, cruise control vacuum pump (if fitted), gearbox connector, fuse box, battery cables, window washers, crash sensors (if fitted), I’m sure I have forgotten a few things. Anyway, just feed them back through into the car and the engine bay starts to look tidy.
Left hand side of the engine bay.
Right hand side of the engine bay.
Or not! Hidden underneath the washer bottle there was quite a large hole through to the wheel well. The more I go over this car, the more it seems like the chap selling it did a good cleaning job on it (I don’t really have enough experience with Land Rovers to know whether the odd hole here is normal, I mean I know they get rusty, but are bodywork holes common?).
With everything from the outside fed through into the car, all that is left to do is disconnect the plugs and injector ECU inside the car and feed the plugs through the firewall into the engine bay. I bagged up the plugs in an attempt to water proof them. I don’t really want to remove the engine harness yet as I can’t get full access to it until the body is off the car.
The last section of the loom to come out is from around the steering column and pedals. To remove this you need to remove the ignition barrel, but unfortunately the ignition barrel is screwed onto the steering column with bolts that snap off once screwed in (to stop someone stealing the car easily). So to remove them, I used a hacksaw blade to score a groove into the top of the bolts and used a large flat blade screw driver to screw them out.
With that done, and after some pulling (and a small amount of swearing) I managed to wrestle the loom out from around the steering column and mounting cage. With that the whole loom was ready to be removed from the car:
Whilst in the process of moving the loom from the car, I weighed it. The weight of the loom minus the LPG ECUs, door wiring and the engine harness was 16.3Kg. Hopefully after cutting out the chaff it will weigh half as much, and have no wasted wire. Here is a photo of the loom laid out on the floor ready for chopping up.
Luckily (or unluckily), my car doesn’t have air-con or airbags. So I don’t have the associated sensors, but the wires are still put in the car. The reason being is it’s cheaper for Land Rover to design and fit a common loom to every car regardless of optional extras, since there are so many man hours required to produce a single loom, it is not financially viable to make individual looms and keep the car affordable. Therefore there are a lot of extra bits and pieces on the loom that are either not connected, or just stop suddenly in plugs, so these will all be removed.
However, there are exceptions to this. In particular the air conditioning loop, which starts at the ignition switch and travels to a 60amp fuse in the fuse box under the bonnet. It then travels off to some empty relay sockets. I plan to keep the ignition switch and fuse connections, I will be able to use these to wire in an air compressor to run the compressed air diff locks that I will eventually be installing. I shall cut useless sections of the circuit out.
I am going to chop up the loom at my leisure now that it is inside. So I will have to keep you updated as I progress with it.
Anyway, that’s it for this time. Next Job, remove the body from the Chassis
