MOT booked in for tomorrow. Going to sleep with everything crossed tonight, but to be honest I’m expecting a fail.

As I said in the previous post, brake imbalance is the most likely - or perhaps a leak somewhere. Maybe the seats aren’t bolted down securely enough or perhaps the fuel tank seals are knackered. The shock absorber bushes are a bit crappy too!

I’m long past my late November deadline, due to some problems with batteries and charging. I popped out to the drive just after my last post to find the batteries dead as doornails. The only cause I can think of is that I left the heater switched on. Shouldn’t make a difference, but clearly something did!

Charged the batteries, started the engine and found that the bloody thing wasn’t charging. The charge warning light was flickering slightly and the battery voltage stayed down at 24.5v or so. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth at this point.

A few posts on the EMLRA forums and a bit of money spent and The Duke now has a new generator cable and a brand new set of 075 batteries. Quite an expensive set of purchases, especially since they didn’t actually fix anything. Well, OK, they did help but they were not the silver bullets I’d hoped for.

Wiggling the old cable where it attaches to the generator panel had always caused the charge warning light to flicker. The new cable fixes this and I can refurbish the old one over the winter. It didn’t make a difference to the charging problem though. The new batteries provide a massive chunk of finest umph to the starter and hold a voltage of over 25v when disconnected - but they didn’t fix the problem either.

In the end I took the generator panel to bits to check around in there. Found that everything is working as it should, so moved on to the shunt panel. There are two supplies from the generator panel to the shunt panel, one for the radio batteries and one for the vehicle batteries. I found that the radio supply (which was disconnected as I have no radio batteries) was reading 30v, while the vehicle supply was down at 24v. So, in the end I swapped them over and hey presto, it works!

Lord only knows why the vehicle supply is reading so low. Anyway, I have a charging Land Rover again and I can debug the problem later on. On the plus side, using the radio supply and shunt means I get an ammeter reading, showing the current passing from generator to batteries. Looks cool and actually gives me some feedback about what’s going on.

Anyway, that’s why I’m so late. Keep those fingers crossed and I’ll report back tomorrow!