Shaun D

Two batteries in parallel aren't normally a problem as long as they are a pair, i.e same make, same type, same age and if you can from the same batch. My old Disco has two batteries in parallel, one's a Planet and one's a Banner (nothing like a bit of quality ) and they go flat after about two weeks so I make sure to keep them charged up. Are you sure you've not just got a battery drain, interior light on,alternator faulty or something like that? If they've gone completely to sleep be sure to wake them up slowly, keep the current really low, less than about 3 amps per battery ideally and just leave them on for several days. I'm lucky all my chargers have digital ammeters on them and I leave them on until the current does not drop any lower. All the time the current is slowly declining more of the plate area is being reclaimed, if you stop charging too early those parts of the plates that have not been reclaimed can be permanently lost and the batteries capacity is permanently reduced as a result. If you give to much current to a battery that has "gone to sleep" then you will buckle the plates or turn the electrolyte to a grey soup and all you can do is throw the battery away. You can even do this if you jump start a vehicle and charge the battery off the alternator. Patience is the only way. If you don't use your truck on a daily basis buy a maintenance charger and leave it on that. Lead acids are funny things, I think they have more of a "memory effect" than NiCads and everybody goes on about them!

My compressor is a really old hydrovane (6.8cfm IIRC it's got a 1.5kw motor) it didn't like driving air tools so I put it onto a 50 litre tank, job done. The only thing that can suck the tank dry..... is my die grinder, after about 3 minutes the tank is down to about 80 lbs and I have to stop and wait a bit, everything else is fine. I bought a cheap £30 1/2" impact gun,looks like a cheap cp gun but it wouldn't undo LandRover wheel nuts most times so I invested in an Ingersoll Rand 1/2" gun the difference is astounding, it's not been beat yet. Anyone want a little used cheap impact gun? Shaun.

Bought a complete set of fixed head ones about three years ago, they've been brilliant but I did fill them with spray grease from new. Bought a set of flex head last year, I don't use them so often but when I do they're a lifesaver. What you can do with the flexhead is turn them to 90 degrees and ratchet a nut off a stud that's facing away from you, means you can twiddle a nut off really easily where otherwise it would be real pig with lots of hard work with an open-ender.

Bought a set of 4 Uniden PMR845-2CK (from Argos) lost one walking the dogs but I can't blame the that on the radio, one other has lost it's mike signal somewhere so it transmits a blank carrier. We now have pair of radios after 18 months . But they are rechargeable and the battery life is pretty good, the kids can use them all weekend without being charged. One thing I would say is that the range is measured in fibs, it says 6Km on the box but our tests show it's more like 2Km and that's line of sight too.

Fluke for me please, got a Fluke 179 at the moment for work (I'm an autoelectrician, so it's always on) and an old Fluke 73 in the kitchen drawer at home. Had a Fluke 77 series III until some toerag ripped off my Disco when I parked it up for half an hour one evening with some gear in it. I just think they are almost bullet proof. But just the same if you only use one occasionally then there are lots of reasonable choices, I think I would go for Iso-Tech. Go for autoranging and keep away from the really cheap stuff. Regarding leads, I keep the silicon cable and if I need special leads for something I just stop for 5 minutes and make some. I've got a pair that stretch the length of a vehicle, it makes life easy when you want to take a measurement at the back and the switch is at the front (in tank fuel pumps for instance). Regards Shaun

Just a comment regarding load sharing with twin motors, series wound motors aren't constant speed units so as long as the units are of the same type and in similar condition as Jim says I don't see that there will be a problem.As I see it if one motor is say 5% faster than the other it would do maybe 5% more work (at worst) it would not carry nearly all the load as it would be if they were "fixed speed" units. I have worked out a simple method of measuring the imbalance between the 2 motors to prove (or if I'm wrong disprove) this. The point about series/parallel motors also intrigues me, I intend to take one apart soon and see exactly what they mean. I can see two possibilities:- 1. the field windings have been connected in some parallel arrangement before connecting them in series with the armature. 2. There is a field winding in parallel with the armature, parallel wound motors have a much more constant speed characteristic, so the most likely reason for this would be to stop the motor from overspeeding under light load conditions. All I know is this is the most interesting and promising project I've worked on in years (P.S don't tell Jim, he might get really big-headed about it!) regards Shaun.

Just got to put my tuppence worth in To introduce myself: I'm the one setting up the test equipment to do the electrical tests on Jim's new winch. All the talk about current draw for this setup is fine, if a series wound motor was purely resistive, but it's not. It posesses inductance which is something any wound item (for that read field windings and armature windings) has. (Stick with me here I'm trying not to get too anoraky but I think this is important.) First an inductor has the effect of trying to prevent rapid changes in current flow, secondly an inductor is also an electromagnet, has to be really or an electric motor just wouldn't work. The effect with a series wound motor is this:- 1.The motor is switched off doing nothing. 2. Power is applied, current starts to flow. 3. The current ramps up (it would ramp exponentially but other effects come into play), it does not jump instantly to the short circuit current of V/R. 4. A very strong magnetic field is rapidly developed in the field windings, this is where the energy rushing into the motor goes first. 5. The same current of course goes through the armature where another field is developed, these two fields interact and the motor starts to revolve. With me so far? not asleep yet? It gets worse. 6. With the motor now revolving the armature starts to behave like a dynamo and a voltage is developed that tends to cancel the battery voltage and the current starts to fall (with a permanent magnet motor on no load the dynamo voltage practically matches the battery voltage and the current drops to practically nothing). 7. As the current starts to fall the field strength drops, and so the dynamo voltage is reduced, therefore the motor continues to speed up, this is practically a vicious circle and with no load a perfect series wound motor would rev to infinity. In practical terms a series wound motor can rev to destruction. 8. If the load is increased the motor slows down, the dynamo voltage is reduced and current rises, the motor makes more torque, but also the field strength increases and the motor slows down. It's not so much the load that slows the motor but the increased field strength. It is usually easier to visualise a permanent magnet motor first where motor current is V(bat)-V(dynamo)/motor resistance, and then think about how this affects the field strength, with a weaker field trying to make the motor rev faster. How does this affect twin motor winches? Inrush current will be quite a bit higher, possibly double but we're not sure yet but I'm sure they won't be as big as the scaremongers say . When they're revolving things change, if you think of a motor as a way of changing current into line tension then for a single motor winch current might be for example 200 Amps, for a twin that would be 100 Amps per motor the field strength would be half, the speed would try to double but before this happened the dynamo voltage would reduce and current would increase (we're working faster, the extra energy has to come from somewhere) and I would think the current would settle somewhere between 200-400 amps all other things being equal. Regarding putting 24V on 12V motors, the limiting factor of power output is the rated current, therefore twice the voltage is twice the effective power not (half the square) in my opinion. The other limits are overspeeding and commutation problems causing brushgear overheating. Motor life is going to be shorter of course but in practical terms you have to make a trade off. All I know is, at the end of that biiiiig pull the motors were barely more that tepid, I would not even have called them warm, listen to the motor pitch on that final pull over the top, it had a savage lip on it, it doesn't show on that camera angle unfortunately, I think a single motor winch would have been nearly smoking . This new winch is very impressive when you see it working in real life. Waiting to be shot down by a professional electric motor designer . Shaun.

The Disco would win hands down as the Defender driver would be too busy trying to unhook his belt loop from the doorkeep

IIRC this system runs the batteries in parallel for charging and normal loads, briefly putting them in series for starting duty (but leaving the rest of the system on just 1 battery). This is fine for short bursts but won't be any good for winching as the batteries could not be on charge at the same time. In fact I think that one battery would be on charge, the other one would not, as a result one battery would go flat first causing a charge imbalance which would be catastrophic to the batteries. Much easier (and simpler) to go the 24V alternator route. You would also be running 2 alternators and therefore quite simply you would have more electricity to play with! Shaun.

Got two alternators on my G-reg Disco 3.9EFI (it's a long story ok?) one 65 Amp, one 80Amp and two batteries, one each side of the rad (12Volt) all in parallel. Had a problem with one warning lamp flickering, turned out to be a faulty regulator on one of them, fitted a new one, no problems since. You need two warning lamps, I used the brake pad wear lamp as the second one on mine as the system had been half ripped out by the previous owner anyway. There is no problem with doing this, just bear in mind that they don't load share unless they are absolutely identical. What happens is you run on just one (the one with the highest voltage) and the other one is effectivelya backup for when the load is high. When I start winching they both get Bl**dy hot so I know they're working . It's excellent for jumpstarting dead vehicles as well. What I also did was run the output wire from the second unit to the second battery so there is a bit of resistance between the two (so they don't "see" each other too much, if you get what I mean). When I changed engines the old one was a 3.5 with the alternator on the driver's side the new one was early 3.9 with the alternator on the passenger side, so I just used both sets of brackets and the 3.5 water pump, as a result it's all Land Rover . Hope this helps someone, Shaun

Don't believe the system uses the speedo pulse, just the four wheel sensors. Bad earth? always a possibility, check supplies and earth at ECU. Small point, did you unplug the solenoid connector to measure the voltages? things like this are always better measured while everything is connected, a digital multimeter has such a high impedance it will pick up a voltage from any leakage in the ECU particularly when the load is disconnected. Personally I use a test lamp on any circuit where higher currents are involved as the DMM can just confuse you. Minor soapbox issue, I think ABS is so good it should be compulsory on all new vehicles.I even thought about fitting it to my G-reg Disco but the effort would be horrendous. Climbing off soapbox, exit stage left. Shaun PS. I do stuff like this for a living, I'm an Autoelectrician. Puts Down trumpet.

Hi, In my opinion it would probably be easier to repair the ABS than take it out! First things first, check the brake light switches and their adjustment, there's more than one. Then test the ABS relays and fuses. You will probably find all the other fault codes are "phantom" and caused by the lack of power to the valve block. IIRC the system does not supply any power to the solenoids until the vehicle has achieved the 5mph mentioned, I think it's likely the valve relay that does this has failed (or the fuse has blown). There are 3 relays in the system, the warning lamp relay which you have obviously found, the next one to it is the valve relay and the last is the pump relay. HTH, Shaun.

Friend of mine had a Range Rover pickup he called "two tubes" because he reckoned he used two tubes of Gripfill to hold it all together! Oh, and it never fell apart! Did get turned into a trialler in the end, don't know if he renamed it. Shaun.

Hi Ivan, Just a word of warning Be careful when wiring direct to the starter motor to defeat the spider, if you leave the original wire connected you may get the starter motor "hanging up" and not releasing when you let the key back, if you don't you may find the glow plugs stay on all the time the engine is running, causing a flat battery and killing the plugs (the cranking signal goes to the glow plug timer relay). If you feel it has confirmed a faulty spider bite the bullet and whip it out (easier said than done, I know, I've done tons of them). Pop it open, inspect the circuit board with a magnifying glass and resolder any joints with cracks round them, they will be the ones on the relays (if you are not too handy with a soldering iron find someone who is). Put it all back together, job done. I've not had one too badly damaged to repair yet. Just off to read the spider thread now, what I've just written is probably in there already HTH Shaun.

Hi Dunc, I've got a T-Max 11000 on my Disco, I'm very pleased with it although I think mine is a bit noisy (sounds like the brake is rattling inside the drum). It certainly seems to pull very hard and with a snatch block is practically unstoppable, I say practically as it was once beaten by a piece of beech hedge I was trying to pull out, but as the 8 inch dia tree I had stropped the towbar to was starting to pull over I don't think it was the winches fault! I have had to mend one as a friend of mine plunged one into some Slindon slurry and it wouldn't work when it had dried out. I stripped the motor and washed the cr*p out then sealed it up with silicone sealer when I put it back together. I'll do this to mine when I get a chance and would recommend that anyone doing deep wading should do the same. I rarely use the hand control as mine is wired for internal switches, I also hid the control box behind the grille which I think looks much better than mounting it above the drum and of course lets you see the cable better. Hope this waffle helps, Shaun

Mark, Fitted a Scorpion (love the accidental mis-spelling by the way) winch bumper to the front of my 1990 3.9 EFi Disco with a T-Max 11000 in it. Fitted and winch working in 2 1/4 hours single handed and I am more than pleased with it. Fitted nicely and never moved even when pulled to a standstill with a snatch block on it. Looks good too! Will upload an image when I can work out how to do it! Shaun

Don't worry about solenoid life, that would like not using your brakes to save your pads IMHO most solenoids die of water and rust not overuse. Don't forget, when stowing your cable the motor is under no load so the solenoid is not working so hard anyway. (Oh, and I think Jimbo's 8274 overruns about 10 feet you just have to allow for it!)

Just been to your website, I've got a lightweight too, but I would have to take more than 1 photo as the chassis is standing under a Gazebo, the bodywork is on a trailer and the bulkhead is in the greenhouse! One day I'll get it finished, in the meantime my Disco will have to do! Shaun.

No particular opinion here but I know both the accumate and optimate have a good reputation. Anything designed as a maintenance or float charger should be ok, remember it does not have to be big as it is not intended to charge the battery it only has to prevent self-discharge. HTH Shaun.

Just a couple of thoughts; In my opinion, lead acids don't mind being float charged for quite long periods so long as the charging voltage is closely controlled, typically 13.8 Volts, notice we're working to decimals here . Unfortunately most (insert your own favourite diy motorstore name here) chargers don't do this as they have no regulation whatsoever. A quite small charger is enough to just keep a battery topped up, 1/2 an Amp is often enough. It will shorten the life a bit but that is probably better than letting it going flat and then trying to revive it! Second bit of info, if you do have a really flat battery, you know, the one that takes no charge whatsoever when you first put it on, wake it up s l o w l y. I always charge these on a bench power supply with variable current limit and keep it down to 1/2 or 1 Amp, no more. It may take a week to come back, but if you try to make it "have it" the paste comes off the plates and you can just put it in the bin. But what do I know, I'm just an Autoelectrician