We are coming down the mountainside after a quick hit & run visit to our bush property in north east Victoria.
There's tree branches on the track, I veer into the
embankment to aviod one and clunk.
A branch is tossed up under the car, it hits a bit harder than normal and drags on the ground, I stop.
Its just after dusk, but I can see a substantial branch hanging out from the undercarrige just in front of the rear passenger side wheel.
I pull it out and off we go, no big deal its happened a hundred times before.
A kilometer later I notice the sub-tank is not reading, then the main fuel guage goes out.
Must have knocked a plug loose, I've got fuel and a dinner date and can worry about this later!
20 minutes later we are out of the dirt and a few km into the highway.
I'm pulling a trailer and glance at it occasionally in the rear view mirror as you do.
Its now pitch dark and I begin to get suspicous, I can't see any red glow from the tail lights.
Better
check them , so I put indicators on only to see the dash light blink unusally fast.
This isn't looking good, so I stop and
check the lights.
Shock horror, I don't have a single operating rear light, no stop lights indicators
reversing lights or even brake lights, its very dark, and I had cars behind me.
I knew the guages and sub-tank pump was out, but who's knows what else?
Grab a light and look under the car where the log had struck, and there I saw it, I knew instantly we were in trouble, almost the entire main loom running along the chassis rail to the cars rear was bleep tered, the blunt end of the log had rammed
home with force into the chassis rail and the loom had been caught in between.
Approximately 18 of 22 wires were smashed and severed.
The log had even bent the bottom seam where the body/chassis are welded together.
Worse the loom was ripped out in a most difficult location.
In many years of driving I have never sustained such loom damage.
A local farmer pulled up to see if we were ok. I knew I couldn't drive 100km
to
Melbourne like this, so asked him to follow behind and hence provide cover from marauding
police cars while I limp the few Km's to the small township of
Yarck. From there its a loney dirt track back to our bush property.
We had not taken supplies but scrapped to-gether baked beans for tea and my wife cooked scones with jam and cream from stuff in our car fridge we had intended to use for a devonshire tea we hadn't got around to having.
Off to bed early - it was going to be a painful to-morrow.
Next morning was not looking good, their is frost on the ground and its 4 degrees.
Electronics is my game but I knew this was going to be a serious battle and a real
test of just how prepared we might be.
Lying on a cold concrete floor, it took half an hour to set up lights on the
problem , remove interfering brackets , cut cable ties restrainting the loom
and fitting a rope such that it pulled the two ends of the loom an inch closer to-gether such that the sheared wires had a chance of overlapping.
The above was an important step and meant that I could attempt to re-join the wires.
I always carry a 12v Dick Smith soldering iron, solder, multimeter good wire cutters and a few bits to do the odd repair but this was beyond what I ever expected to do.
I sat down and thought about how to approach this, even if I could solder some wires, each one would make the loom more difficult to manipulate and position.
All the time I would be lying on my back looking up with poor light.
I choose to first strip and heavily tin every wire end with the thought that I might be able to push each two mating wires to-gether and just touch them with the iron to get the solder to run and join them.
There was insufficent free cable to twist the wire ends together and the only
other choice of, perhaps adding in extra wire would require double the soldering at the least.
As I'm working thru the above process I suddenly realized, there are two Blue/Black wires and 4 black wires - which mates to which ?
Closer inspection shows that 2 of the black wires are different guages meaning only two need to be guessed.
I peel back the corrugated plastic cover looking for clues and yep one of the black wires intertwines with a white one and I soon find its matching other end.
This leaves only the Blue/Blacks to be mixed, and
well I would just guess.
What a process, 2 hours later, using every bit of skill I had to trick wires into position and will them to join resulted in 36 wire ends all joined.
Just stripping the wires in such a awkward position meant you had to pull on them and as the wire gave way your hand would fly back into the
suspension components.
Soldering meant multiple small finger burns to add to the blood from hand cuts.
I was sore all over and stuffed, my wife kept feeding me hot coffe and
I crawled out from under the car, stood up and felt quite dizzy and shaking a bit.
Fine I have all the wires joined, now to insulate them some how before I could
risk turning the car on.
Back in the lab I would use graded heatshink but not here.
Your normal pvc insulation tape does work
well either and is hard to apply in close quarters and usually unsticks with heat so I carry another multi-use item, high quality masking tape.
With scissors I cut 1 inch square pieces and feed them between the wires with tweezers and carefully folded the tape around onto itself and rolled it up.
This stuff sticks much better pvc, but is hard to get off later.
4 hours into the exercise now, and all ready for the big
test.
The guages came on first, then the blinkers but wrong way round, then the tail lights and reversing lights.
Not bad - I swap the blue/blacks and indicators are ok - all is looking good.
My wife comes up and applies the brakes for the last
test, this should be a breeze.
Damm no brake lights !
I had noticed a couple of cuts in the 4 wires that had not seperated this must be the problem, and spend 20 minutes taping and testing them to no result.
Time is moving on and I start to think about how to get
home without brake lights, maybe I could turn on the tail lights every time I applied the brakes, but it was now into the afternoon and I had better come up with a plan soon.
I didn't know what wire colours were what.
The only solution was to get to a brake light and follow back the
wiring noting its colour and then testing it at several points to find the break.
Much easier said than done.
1 hour later with the use of a hand held 12v battery I always carry I had got back to where the cable was originaly sheared and now knew that it was the Green/Yellow wire.
But I was stuck, I had re-broken the sheared cable and feed in my own voltage and the stop lights worked but no power was coming from the front of the car when the brake pedal was pushed.
Suddenly I remembered that the brake light on the rear door was loomed elsewhere and it was also off, it had to be a problem common to both circuits, could I have blown the switch?
Damm, in wouldn't be the fuse would it - and yes it was.
What bad luck, a twin fault, I had thought repairing the wires was enough but
appling the brakes after the incident had activated a short amongst the sheared wires.
6 hours into the solution, and I just stood there with relief, it was all working
and I need to go
home and take a break.
Off we went, about 50 meters later I noticed the sub tank warning light was on.
Stuff it, its not important and off we went.
Some hours later I thought about the fragile patrol sub-tank circuit, it was a good chance it had logged a fault code and past experience told me to pull the battery for a minute and reset its ECU.
Yes it worked , the error light reset and all was good in the world !
Anyone for a mindless movie next weekend !
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