SLROC Forum

Just when I thought finding engine oil under the driver's seat coming out of the wiring was weird (now fixed - but who came up with that design?!) I've encountered anther "feature" of my 110 Defender...

When I pull the handbrake on, the engine stalls out.  Here's the sequence of events:

Sat stationary, engine ticking over, not in gear.  Pull on the handbrake.  Engine light starts flickering on + heater coil light starts flickering on + engine starts misfiring and then cuts out, all within about two seconds.

I've kind of been living with it for a while - I can live without a handbrake...but, now things are getting worse and coaxing the stupid thing into starting has gone from a technique to an art to a pain in the derriere.  Now, the sequence often goes like this:

Switch on the ignition with the handbrake off -> high-frequency relay chattering from under the driver's seat + engine light and coil light don't come on -> pull the handbrake on a bit and off a bit until the relay stops buzzing (I think it's the heater coil relay) -> engine and coil light come on -> might start first turn of the starter OR turns over and over and over, coil and engine light flickering on and off all the time, engine almost catching and black smoke coughing out of the exhaust.  If I'm lucky, it'll catch after thirty seconds or so and I'm away, although more recently, the engine's taken to cutting out while I'm driving and then cutting back in again, flashing up the engine warning light.

Today, though, it cut out while I was driving and I was there for ten minutes b*ggering about with the handbrake and the starter trying to get going again...which I did, in the end...but I wasn't far off a Basil Fawltey/tree thrashing episode, to be honest.

So, I think it's fairly obviously a short somewhere, which I also think is affecting the ECU (oh, the joys of a Td5 - if anyone ever tells you their reputation for being unreliable is undeserved, they're lying) and either earthing it, cutting power to it or giving it some sort of input it's not expecting.  The ECU isn't logging anything relating to this problem though (just that I don't have air conditioning etc).  I've disconnected the wire from the handbrake that operates the warning light/circuit, but there's no change, so I can only guess that the mechanism of pulling the actual brake on is causing something to short, but quite what is a mystery...

Any thoughts on this would be very much appreciated - otherwise, I'm just blindly unplugging things and changing things until I either make it worse or make it better...

Thanks very much,

Paul

Right...

  a bit of playing about, disconnecting things later and I've discovered that, if I disconnect the handbrake cable from the handbrake lever, no amount of playing about with the cable (i.e. pulling/pushing it with pliers) brings the engine/coil lights on and the relay is stuck in "chatter" mode.

  Now, I haven't tried running an earth wire to the handbrake cable to prove this yet, but I suspect the ECU is currently earthing through the handbrake cable, rather than however it's meant to earth, due to a bad earth point somewhere - I seem to remember reading somewhere about somebody with a 90/110 having their handbrake cable melt, as the electric system had been using it as an earth path when an earth-strap failed.  I've checked all my earth straps and they look good and solid to me, so I suspect corrosion actually in the earthing point (i.e. around the bolt) is the problem - does that sound likely?

  Oh well - back out to lie in the mud and cow-leavings again...

Paul

yep you have a bad earth cable best to put a new one on to the engine and replace the one onto the gearbox as well, you might also need a new handbrake cable,  i cleaned the earths on mine and it melted the new handbrake cable, replaced the earth and added another and all is well on its third handbrake cable.

Cheers for that - I've run a 27 amp cable from the battery negative straight to the ECU and that seems to have fixed it for now, but you must be right about the earth straps...a job for nicer weather when I've got it up on a lift, I think

...I still might give it a damn good thrashing with a tree branch, though...

Paul

Sounds like the seatbox has in effect become unearthed from the rest of the body due to corrosion around fixings with the result that the only earth path is through the handbrake,try fitting an earth wire between the seatbox and the chassis.

Yep, that'd be the best thing to do, definitely - as I understand it, there's an earth strap between the chassis and the driver side footwell (and I think I remember seeing it during one of my many foray's under the engine) - I wouldn't be surprised if it's corroded clean through...I had a starter cable on a van do that once.

I was quite surprised to get a spark off the handbrake lever mounting bracket when I was testing the earth with a jump-lead from the battery negative - I'm not sure what that implies...making a circuit I suppose, but I can't get my head around why it would spark, considering it was supposed to be at ground potential, anyway...I'm surprised it could have a floating voltage high enough to spark...

Thanks for your help,

Paul

The things a person learns on this site is just brill.

I for one actualy wanted to see him beat the living daylights out of the 110 (far to much bad news about these days, we need chearin up)

illl be checking utube daily for the slroc basil faulty moment.....