Given that I don't know the condition of any of the brakes up front I'll say yes please on those too, Mr Reno. I've decided I'm just going to fit the correct light lens on the rear rather than worrying about the whole units, much easier that way, especially since the units fitted work a treat as I found out today...
There are certain milestones in any project, particularly one as brave/stupid as this one. Today, the milestone of lights was achieved, mostly. Mike was at the unit well before me today and called me just as I was getting stuff together to go in to let me know he'd already hooked up all the electrics, was I going in to help? Of course I was going in to help, and I was very surprised he'd already put all the wires where they needed to go.
Key in the ignition (which you turn towards yourself and is on the left of the column, counter intuitively) and see what happens. Oooh, an ignition light! We didn't have one of those last time we put a battery on the car.
Soon we realised that more work was going to be needed, connections cleaned up, bulbs replaced, that sort of thing. On trying the various controls we found the wiper motor works at speeds Slow and Not As Slow, the new wiper blades were fitted when the screen was cleaned and that proved entirely satisfactory. The blower fan works, and blows both Slow and Not As Slow, so again that was deemed adequate. Sidelights and front indicators did nothing, indicator switch did nothing, headlights worked on dip and main (twist stalk for sidelights, pull down once for dip and again for main), we tried the hazard switch and one indicator worked on the rear. Here's a boring video.
Rear running lights work and, after the switch came unstuck, so did the brake lights. Reversing lights were found to be purely decorative, there's no wires at all running to them and by the looks of things never were on this car so the tailgate is probably off another car, perhaps the same donor as the other metallic green panels came off as this one was also metallic green (that's at least one front door, both inner front wings, one outer front wing for those keeping tabs). Here's an even more boring video.
Also learned that the passenger side lens is the wrong type but that it's because there were two manufacturers offering the same rear light with a slightly different design. Info from R6 guru Mr Reno on that one. I'm going to replace just the lens as the one fitted is not only the wrong type but also appears to be from the wrong side of the car. After some jiggery pokery and a full compliment of new bulbs we had both indicators on the back working.
My brother fiddled bout with switches and switch cleaner and got the indicator stalk working and the telltale for it on the dash working. Also of note is that the dash lights illuminate, the hazard warning light works, the ignition telltale works. As yet there is no visible telltale for dip or main beam aside from a very dim red light on the far left so there's some investigation still to do on the instrument cluster, it may be bad connections, dead bulbs, or something of that sort. Odometer/Speedometer cable was also reconnected as that had come unseated at some point.
The interior light works, both door switches operate with the passenger one needing a bit of a clean as it's a little sticky.
Up front, everything but the driver's side indicator works. We've not found the reason for this yet, we suspect it's a bad connector or earth somewhere, we just ran out of time to investigate further. Used the old headlight bowl just to test the new bulbs and see that things worked. Rather than use the original golf ball type halogens I used a variant that has the same mounting bracket but is more like an H4 in shape. It ups the light output considerably without looking overly modern, a sensible modernisation. I've already forgotten what the bulb type is called.
The most frustrating thing to discover is that the starter motor appears to have died. We did bench test it a little over a year ago but didn't then bench test it again before refitting it to the car which we should have done. It can be resurrected by a local guy who won't charge a great deal and who did a great job on the starter motor for my Princess. So we didn't get to see if the car would run today which was a shame. We did learn the handbrake definitely works and appears to work quite well.
Only a short day on the car today but a very productive and rewarding one. Seeing so much spring to life after being dormant for such a long time was really exciting, probably disproportionately so.
