Nick Taylors blog

As the D90s are not used every day, it’s wise that we look after the on-board batteries. I recommend the CTEK maintenance chargers, which are easy to mount on-board (I have the US800 model installed under the seat in the Defenders). 

However, connecting an extension cord currently involves crawling under the truck, removing a waterproof cap and plugging in the extension – not ideal, you get grubby and it is a little vulnerable to rock damage. 

I discovered that Marinco/Guest make some great electrical accessories designed for marine use as part of the “ConnectCharge” system. It does what it says on the can, it connects your internal charger to the shore supply. I picked up a couple of ConnectCharge Inlets (P/N 150CCI) and some ConnectCharge cords (P/N 157200) which clip together to make a robust system (BTW, I ordered them from http://www.stayonline.com). 

Now the inlet requires a 1-7/8″ hole. I’ll be mounting mine on the wing vents, which means I can easily replace the vent cover and I won’t damage the wing. Coupled with two retractable power extension cords, which will plug into the ConnectCharge inlets I think I’ll have a much better system. 

Of course, the ultimate solution is to have an automatic ejection system, like the Kussmaul Super Auto Eject, as found in emergency vehicles.

I like the quality of videos from Vimeo, so I’m thinking of uploading my HD content there. The following video, while not HD, is just a little test.

Don’t Let Lee Drive! A Desert Driveby. from Nick Taylor on Vimeo.

The other day I decided to get to the bottom of what was leaking oil over the right side of the block in my 300 Tdi Defender 90. It didn’t take long to track down.

There’s a black plastic thing attached directly to the rocker cover.

It’s the Cyclonic Cleaner, part of the crankcase breather system, Land Rover part number ERR1471. It’s easy to remove, just a single bolt and two hose-clips. On the tube that connects with the engine, there’s a small o-ring. That was my culprit! It had split and was spraying oil down the side of the engine. Now there is an official Land Rover part (LLO100000) for this o-ring, but a quick trip to NAPA had a replacement installed within the hour. Problem solved!

The filter is supposed to be cleaned every 12k or so, but I know it’s not religiously carried out. I cleaned mine in Coleman Fuel (as I don’t have any kerosene handy), and that did the trick. I left it to dry overnight, and the next morning, with just a few seconds of white fumes, everything worked fine.

In the corner of the garage I’ve had a High Sierra HS-1800/Pro for about a year. I’d procrastinated as I knew the install would be a little “mechanical”, involving drilling the bodywork of the Green D90.

But, having recently attained my General Class license, I though I should just get it done.

Having purchased the “Platinum Package“, I had everything I needed to install the antenna.

Firstly, I lined up the mount at the rear of the D90 (making sure I had garage clearance), and had the top 2 bolt locations line-up in the rear interior and the bottom 2 line-up inside the wheel-arch outside the truck. I braced the nuts and bolts with a couple of sheets of aluminum on the non-visible sides. Next, I drilled holes for the ground, power and co-ax. The ground is a short run below the antenna to the exhaust bracket. The power runs in the top of the bracket to the interior. The co-ax runs a little higher and into the interior with a female-female SO-239 connector.

With the bracket mounted and the basic cabling laid, I added powerpole connectors to all the electrical connectors.

Plugging in the tuning module (basically a fancy switch that moves the antenna up and down, and altering it’s electrical length while showing the SWR), I could see the antenna was working – I could also hear it working!

I knew I wouldn’t like the HS way of tuning the antenna, so at the same time I bought a “Turbo Tuner“. This would enable me simply to hit the tune button on my IC-7000, wait a few moments, and have the Turbo Tuner find the lowest SWR for the frequency I require. As the Turbo Tuner has great reviews, I thought it’d be a great way of doing this.

Alas, I ran into problems almost immediately. Despite triple-checking the connections (one to the CI-V port, the other into the tuner port), and the settings (basically the baud rate and the CI-V address) I could not get it to work. After more experimenting I decided to do a factory reset on the IC-7000 to see if that would help. But that meant loosing all the information I had stored in memory… I had a cup of tea and a think…

As luck would have it, the mail showed up, complete with CI-V leads and my IC-7000 cloning software – perfect timing! A couple of days ago I ordered the WCS7000 software from RT Systems. As soon as I installed the software, I had the rig backed up and performed the reset.

Voila! It worked! The tuner was tuning. But not quite right. The instructions suggest that for the HS1800/Pro antenna the direction should be “normal” and the stall current should be “750ma”. After some experimenting, I had to change the dip-switch settings so the direction was “reverse” and the stall current was “500ma” (so the antenna would reverse direction when it reached the end of its travel).

That seemed to fix things, but then my radio started playing up. I’d read some background on how final stages can be destroyed by ill-using antenna controllers. But I’d done my research and the Turbo Tuner shouldn’t do this! My IC-7000 display was wavering and when I hit PTT most times it would restart.

Then I realised that I’d be transmitting all morning, and the antenna was moving up and down and the rig needs a good 13.8V to work correctly. So I started the D90 and all was well again, phew!

I dressed in the cables, and am ready to give it a good test tomorrow!

My 1997 NAS D90 still had it’s original ICE system in place. It was basically a Clarion head-unit with a 6-disk CD changer. It also has a factory-fitted amplifier driving 4 speakers. Now, I don’t use CDs (except to rip them once), and the changer takes up room in the center console. Plus I was using a pretty awful cassette-tape connector to listen to my iPod/iPhone when driving. After much research I ordered an Alpine iDA-X100 – the revised version of their first “iPod only” head-unit, the iDA-X001.

I decided to keep the factory amp and speakers, the amps is fine and I’ll replace the speakers this summer. That meant connecting the new head-unit to the existing wiring. Now, I’m not going to hack a factory wiring-harness unless I have to so I managed to get a harness that was close enough to work.

As the 1997 D90 was the only year with this configuration, I had to figure out what each on the pins on the factory harness was for. There was some documentation on the web (1, 2, and a useful 3), but I also had to add connectors to the custom harness so it would work with the factory harness. The Alpine unit came with its own unterminated harness, and good documentation (PDF link), it was easy to connect to my wiring.

The pinouts look like this: (click though for large version)

The pinouts for the 10-way connector are for the speakers and self-explainatory. The pinouts for the 8-way connector are as follows:

(Pin 1 is the top left, above the keyed part of the connector, pin 2 is below pin 1, pin 3 is to the right of pin 1, etc.)

1. Phone Mute – not used
2. Amp Trigger
3. Remote – not used
4. 12V+
5. Remote antenna – not used (power for an electric antenna)
6. Illumination
7. ACC – 12V+ switched
8. Ground

Once I had my wiring adaptor cabled, it connected to the factory harness and the x100 works like a dream! Highly recommended.

From Crutchfield, I ordered the following components:
Alpine iDA-X100 Head-unit
Alpine KCE-422i high-speed cable for iPod/iPhone
Receiver Wiring Adaptor for Land Rover
Antenna Adapter

I’ve decided to start using flickr again as I like how easy it makes blogging. For our travel blog, our workflow is based on Aperture and MarsEdit which in turn upload to both flickr and our WordPress blogs. I’m using flickrexport to get my images out of Aperture.

Here’s a picture of one of my trucks by way of a test.

I’m going to have to remember that the pictures cannot be more than 400px wide given the two column layout in my current template. In MarsEdit, I’ll have to use the “small” size for images.