When Agnetha arrived in October, literally nothing electrical was working. After checking every circuit, scrubbing every contact in every switch, and in some cases replacing the switchgear altogether, almost everything now works. The one noteable exception is, of course, the headlight wipers. This was initially because the motor was rusted-up. The windscreen wiper motor worked fine, so I ordered a new motor from Mini Spares in the UK, fitted that to the windscreen wipers and transplanted the old motor to the headlight wipers.
Unfortunately I didn’t think to order a new plug even though it should have been pretty obvious that the original plug is also rusted to hell. This meant I was only able to get the headlight wipers to operate a couple of times before the plug gave out entirely and now it’s just an open circuit of various corrosion products lol.
As for why none of the screenwash pumps worked, rust is also the answer. All three of them (headlights, windscreen and rear screen) had rusted completely. I replaced them with generic 12V pumps by a Polish motorfactor called Maxgear at 19.88zł each (about £3.60!!). They seem a lot more weather-proof and robust than the originals but naturally I didn’t think about how to actually mount them.
I’ve also traced some intermittent faults (and spectacular arcing) back to the ignition switch, hazard switch and indicator stalk. Turns out the repairs I did on them weren’t up to much, so I ordered new indicator and windsceeen wiper stalks and a hazard switch, again from Mini Spares. These were fairly easy to install apart from the wiring order of the sockets on the Allegro is completely different to the classic Mini so I had to fiddle around for an hour to swap the cables around in the plugs – luckily the colour-coding is the same!
The ignition switch was an easy fix – it was just missing a ball bearing that acts on the plastic detents to keep the switch in position. Must have fallen out and gone up the vacuum cleaner when I opened it the first time. The rear window heater switch also came alive in beautiful green illumination after I gave it the now routine “wire brush and hot-glue” treatment – can’t tell if the heater itself works though. The element looks rather corroded.
There were still some electrical gremlins though. It’s a simple car – so how can it be so complicated? As it turns out Agnetha had a couple of modifications. First of all, a relay had been installed to turn the daytime running lights on whenever the ignition was turned on. When I posted a photo of this on social media I got a comment that the wiring was “awful” – and, yeah, it didn’t look great. Secondly, there was another relay installed with an isolation switch to operate the no-longer-present bumper-mounter fog lights when high beam was selected. The wiring for this was in a bad state as well. So I stripped the whole lot out and returned it to the factory-spec wiring given in the Haynes manual.
That solved everything. The trusty wirebrush also got the brake lights working! Feeling confident I then added some cabling for the forthcoming stereo, cleaned out the interior air-box and put the facia back in place.
Then it was time to attend to the rear lights. The indicator/brake/running light clusters both work and I replaced the dead number plate lights with LEDs; a similar type to the interior lights but double the power – it may be a little too much as the rear now seems brighter than the headlights! I might swap them for the interior lights. No joy with the reverse lights. Most likely the reverse switch is verkacked. It will have to wait until I find a way to jack this baby up.
There’s still some work to do but it’s going to be incremental (fix this, replace that) and I think at this stage it’s fair to say the electrics are revived. Now we can focus on stripping down the engine.
Projekt Agnetha 