Today was the day I finally solved the niggling problem of Herman’s alternator. The astute reader will remember that it has been giving me gyp since I first bought the van and I’ve made at least two abortive attempts to sort it out before [exhibit A, exhibit B].

Having a split charge system and hence a spare battery has ameliorated the problem somewhat, in that I’ve got into the habit of swapping the batteries round every couple of weeks and charging up the one I’ve just taken off the ignition circuit, but it’s a pain in the arse carrying a heavy duty battery up two flights of stairs, every time I need to put it on the charger in the flat.

So today, I vowed to have another go:

First off, I swapped the brushes in the alternator, which did sweet FA. Then I traced every bloody lead coming out of the damn thing as they weaved and meandered around Herman’s nice oily engine bay. I removed various of these leads in turn and bypassed them temporarily with lengths of known-good wiring. No matter what I tried, the alternator stubbornly refused to output more than a feeble 6 or 7 volts. 

wish me luck, skip. I’m going in!

Eventually, after about an hour of cursing, swearing and generally having a whale of a time, I happened to trace the lead back from the battery to the starter motor and found that the connector on the starter motor end was so loose, I could undo the nut by hand.

The culprit!

After a good wire-brushing

I undid the nut, whipped off the connector, which was covered in oil and gunk and gave it a brisk rub down with a wire brush, then reconnected it good and tight and fired up the engine…

Halle-fuckin’-leujah! Turns out, the problem had nothing to do with the alternator at all, but was down do a dodgy connection between starter motor and battery. Dontcha just love auto-electrics?

At least with electrical jobs, you dinnae have to get your hands dirty!

Trying to elicit some sympathy from the cat

today i’m going to take you on a journey into time!

it had been bugging me for a while that herman’s clock didnae work. i wouldnae usually be that bothered about something so trivial, but VW have seen fit to make the clock in the LT the size of a dinner plate and stick it right in the middle of the instrument panel. so it’s quite difficult to disregard the fact that the hands are stubbornly refusing to move.

unfortunately, decent access to the clock can only be had by removing the entire instrument panel. so it was out with the screwdriver to remove the four screws and then began the epic task of disconnecting speedo cable, injector advance [ie. cold-start] cable, heater switches and about half a pound of wiring spaghetti.


speedo on the left - clock on the right


i took plenty of snaps as i went along to remind me which wires plugged in where!


after about half an hour, i had the instrument panel completely disconnected and was able to lift it out of the van, so i could get a proper look at what was wrong wi’ the clock.

instrument panel removed


the gaping wound where the instrument panel used to be



once i’d got the instrument panel up to the house and [literally] shone a bit of light on things, it soon became obvious why the clock wasnae working; the connector plugs for the clock and speedo are soldered into a pretty flimsy plastic circuit ribbon and one of the solder points for the plug that goes into the back of the clock had come away from the ribbon. [sorry about the blurry photo!]

clock connector solder has come loose


there was no chance of me trying to solder the connector back on again, as the ribbon was so thin that the soldering iron would melt right through it, so a more creative remedy was called for.

i noticed that, although the section of circuit ribbon that went to the clock looked quite complicated, there were actually only two tracks in the circuit that actually connected to anything; one live and one earth [t’aint exactly a complicated machine, the oul’ dashboard clock!]. the other two tracks in the ribbon didnae connect to anything and just finished in blank terminals.

so it was out wi’ the scalpel and i ‘amputated’ that section of the circuit from the main ribbon and then soldered two leads directly into the plug which goes into the back of the clock

clock heart bypass surgery


i then reassembled the instrument panel, wired everything back in again and soldered my new clock leads into a suitable permanent supply wire behind the dashboard. after the obligatory ‘screw everything back together and find it’s not working’ first go - which was caused by me knocking the plug out of the back of the clock while wrestling the the air conditioning vent into place behind the dash - the job was a good ‘un on the second attempt - and herman can once again tell the time!

at the third stroke, the time will be…

glad to report that, after sticking herman’s freshly charged battery back in again this morning, he started first turn of the key. so that was the reason i had no leccy, after all! it does raise the question tho’ as to why an almost new heavy duty battery got drained down to three volts in the space of a couple of weeks? i did notice, when i reconnected the battery, that the light in the cab roof had been left on. so, i s’pose that could have been the culprit - tho’ i’d not have thought it would have drained a 120aH battery in just over a week. och, i dinnae know. maybe it would. in a way i hope that was the reason. otherwise, it must be a dodgy circuit somewhere and i’m going to have to get up to my elbows in cable spaghetti trying to trace who or what is to blame for the battery drain.

speaking of spaghetti. after i’d established that herman was a ‘runner’ once more, i decided to temporarily wire the immobiliser back in, to see whether he would start with that plumbed into his innards again. the answer was a resounding ‘no’. although i had dashboard electrics [at least that was down to the flat battery], there was no juice to the starter. so out came the immobiliser again and i spent a therapeutic hour or so, reconnecting, soldering and heat shrinking all the leads in the ignition circuit that had been butchered by whoever fitted the immobiliser in the first place. i think it may have been stevie wonder, judging from the half-arsed way most of the connections were taped up. i was able to solder and heatshrink inside the van, thanks to a spiffing new gadget i bought off a guy on ebay on friday and which arrived yesterday.

new toy. i bought me and mazza one each for camping - but it’s great for doing soldering and heatshrinking on herman’s wiring too!


so herman may not be fitted with an immobiliser any more but at least his wiring has been further restored to its original condition and it looks a helluva lot better than it did before.

before - actually the wiring was even worse than this. the yellow tape is my temporary patching up of the hanging off, covered in crap, black electrical tape, that was originally holding everything together


after - thanks to my new toy, i got all the ignition leads resoldered, heatshrunk and nicely bound up in [admittedly garish, but it was all i had] yellow electrical tape


wiring routed back to the steering column again. now that’s much neater than before!

today was one of those one ‘no steps forward and several steps back’ days.

i noticed that, after my shenanigans, pissing about with the steering column the other day, i had no electrics at all. not even a cheery red light on the dashboard when i turned on the ignition. so i spent the best part of the day hoking round the wiring for the ignition circuit and checking my fuses, before i eventually resorted to removing the dashboard to be better able to follow the ignition wiring and see if anything was amiss.

dashboard removed, i found a possible cause for my troubles and an explanation for the fact that herman makes a series of beeping noises after his ignition key is removed; there was an immobiliser secreted behind the dashboard. obviously not a factory job, it looked like it had been fitted by stevie wonder. the wires in the ignition circuit had been hacked apart, the immobiliser crudely wired in and the whole lot crappily wound with elctrical tape, which was hanging off in places. there were also several wires emerging from the immobiliser which were just snipped off and didnae go anywhere.

hiding behind the dashboard - an ‘unnanounced feature’


as regular readers of this shite will know, i’m extremely mistrustful of other people’s wiring in my motors. i’m not making any claims to be a great auto electrician, but at least i only do what i know how to do and i make sure that the connections are well made and well wrapped. so i spent a good half hour or so, painstakingly removing the immobiliser from herman’s ignition system and temporarily splicing the wires back they way they would originally have been. unfortunately, when i tried the key again, herman was still - electrically speaking - as dead as a dodo.

i was just on my way back up to the house, to grab a bottle of guinness export and think things over for a bit when, on a whim, i decided to check the battery. now, i know you’re probably thinking “why the feck didn’t you test the battery first, you eejit?”

well, dear reader. the reason i didnae check the battery first was because it’s a new heavy duty battery only a couple of weeks old and, as i havenae been running the van i assumed it was fully charged [yes - i know ‘to assume makes an ass of u and me’. dinnae feckin’ get smart with me, boy!]. anyway, lo and behold, i had 2,9 pissy volts in the battery. so something had run the fucker into the ground in the couple of weeks or so it’s been since i last turned herman’s motor over.

so, it was out with the battery and onto the charger with it for a good overnight trickle charge. let’s see if actually having the full 12 volts at his disposal, instead of just under three, will inspire herman to spring back into action once more!

i almost forgot:

i got herman insured today - £330,16 from the post office, who i’ve got my existing insurance with. i’ve also about £60 refund due back for the cancellation of GULG’s insurance - which i’ll get without any cancellation fee, since i’ve transferred straight to a new policy - so that works out a pretty good deal. the best quote i’d got from the various online comparison websites was £357. i said to mazza, when i put GULG on ebay, that i’d be happy if we made enough on him to cover herman’s insurance and tax. so we probably just about got there. i’m not going to tax him til the end of the month tho’, since there’s no point giving the taxman his pound of flesh for the whole month, when it’s half over already.

today, thanks to the joys of not working mondays i had a whole day at my disposal to start working on herman. priority number one being of course - the nailing of the fuel problem. elsewhere the entire country was grinding to a halt due to some unseasonal snow showers, but in manchester, the show would go on.

having charged his battery up overnight, i managed to get him running again from his jerrican drip-feed and left the engine running in this way to warm up for a half hour or so. then i shut it off and proceeded to sook away on the pipe from the fuel tank like the proverbial ‘two-bit hooker’. after a lot of mighty lung action i eventually felt the welcome playful splash of diesel agin the back of my mouth and praised the ‘lawd’ that there wasnae a serious blockage in the fuel line - just a helluva lot of air!

running ‘on the drip’ from a jerrican


it was now time to see if herman’s lungs were as up to the job as mine. so i connected the fuel line back to the intake on the fuel filter and started the engine once more. again, to my relief, it started fairly easily, although it was running pretty roughly and i could see [through the transparent section of piping leading into the diesel pump] that a helluva lot of air was being sucked into the pump along with the fuel. in fact it took about ten or twenty minutes for the bubbles to gradually disappear from the feed pipe. there must have been one major airlock in the fuel line somewhere! however, when the air had cleared out of the fuel line, herman once again purred along merrily like there had never been anything wrong.

i left the engine running for at least an hour, just to clear the custard and i also threw a load of redex into the tank to help things along. while herman was chugging away, i had a look around to make a mental note of what other jobs needed sorting. next priority will be the electrics. at the moment i havenae any window wipers, which - given the fact i live in manchester with its enthusiastic rainfall - is quite a biggie.

i ripped out the old radio and found the reason it -like the windscreen wipers - didnae work was because it wasnae actually connected and the plug on the van aerial didnae fit the socket on the back of the radio. when i did connect the radio, it asked me for a PIN no. so i decided to bin it. the radio wasnae the original factory fitted one, so some eejit had wired it into the existing wiring loom - apparently using a machete in the process! - for there were loads of wires hacked off and other ones cut in half with new leads taped into them. after a bit of tracing with my circuit tester, i found out what should and shouldnae be there, ripped out all the frankenstein wiring and rejoined all the original cut cables to how they would have been in the first place. if i’m going to be sorting out an electrical problem, i’d at least like to start my investigations from the original wiring and not some electrical spaghetti that’s evolved over the years!

with the wiring restored to as near factory condition as i could get it, i started investigating the non-functioning window wipers. i ran a lead directly to the window wiper motor and it kicked into action straight away. so thankfully, the wiper motor itself is OK. my circuit tester reported no breaks in the cabling between the motor and the windscreen wiper switch on the steering column, . so the problem must lie with the windscreen wiper switch itself. unfortunately as this is on the steering column, access to the switch’s innards necessitates removal of the steering wheel. i didnae have a socket big enough for the job, so that’ll have to wait til i can buy one.


today, i also did my first bit of driving since the day that will live in infamy, when i turned herman round in his parking place, for easier access to the signwritten side of him. if the rain holds off we can start getting that crappy lettering off tomorrow.

t’was a bit unseasonably festive for the time of year!