Low Speed Fan Fix
Recently, when the aircon was being attended to I was informed that my low speed fan wasn't working. Through threads on here I had tested the inbuilt resistor and found it was open circuit, so with the recent weather and a forthcoming track day I got on with sorting it.
A few weeks back I went looking for a suitable replacement resistor and found that they seem quite hard to get hold of. In the end I bought mine from Mouser Electronics, a US company but who sell in the UK with stock shipped via a distribution centre in Germany. And because shipping was punitively expensive for one, but free for orders over ÂŁ33, I bought five of them!
My thinking being that I could put a small kit together of necessary parts and sell them on eBay and, with any luck, cover my costs.
My plan here is to mount the resistor to the aluminium plate, and then mount that behind the bumper on the car and wire it in where the existing broken resistor was. That approach requires the removal of the front bumper which is probably no bad thing as it's clear it's been off before and I was keen to see why.
As always, there are some trim rivets missing from the inner wheelarch:
These little blighters.
And some rusted fixings that won't shift as well
But soon the bumper is free, exposing the crash bar in all its aluminium glory.
And then aided by my cordless impact wrench, the crash bar is gone too. I've said it before, these impact wrenches are great and save so much time.
Getting closer. So, it's now a case of moving the aircon condenser out of the way, which is easy but requires a bit of care so as not to stress the pipes. I also find quite a bit of debris trapped between it and the radiator.
And then by removing the top radiator hose and removing some retaining clips I can lean the radiator forward and slide the fan up and out because it's just slotted in.
And here is the fan with the offending resistor. You can't see in the photo but one of the wires has burnt through, which seems to be a very common problem, probably due to the design which means it hardly sees any airflow. I dread to think of the number of perfectly good fan units that have been binned where a simple replacement resistor would have saved it. Interestingly this fan, according to the date code moulded in the plastic was manufactured in Nov '04, some 13 months before my car was built (Feb '06) so I'm thinking the bumper had been off to replace it with what I assume was a 2nd hand unit. I wonder how long it lasted before it failed or indeed how long it has been not working.
I then did a test fit of the aluminium plate to check everything would fit. And then again with the resistor attached to it.
Removing the fan isn't strictly necessary, in that I could have wired the resistor in to the wiring elsewhere in the engine bay, but I saw somebody had done it this way and thought it a nice neat solution. 1 hour later after removing the fan I was beginning to regret it. It started off well, in that the Dremel made light work of removing the old resistor.
But once I'd cleaned everything up I just couldn't get the solder to adhere. I have a 25w iron and perhaps it's not man enough, or my solder isn't right but either way I was going nowhere fast. In the end I decided to drill a 3mm hold through each terminal, solder some spades on to the wires going to the resistor and screw it all together, leaving me with this:
Luckily I had no issues with soldering the wire on to the resistor and so, once I had the fan back in behind the radiator, I've got it looking like this. Very neat I think and because the resistor will got hot in operation there's no chance of it compromising any other nearby cables or components.
By this point, in what is becoming a tradition, it is Sunday evening sometime after midnight. Since I have removed the front wheels to remove the bumper I decide it's as good a time as any to fit my track wheels in anticipation of the track day I am planning, so I do that too.
In the end I finish at 1am and then I am straight indoors to book the aforementioned trackday as I had delayed doing it until I knew I could get the car back together and working.
Track Evening - Brands Hatch
A little over 36 hours later and I'm at Brands Hatch ready for an evening track session. I really like these evening sessions as the atmosphere tends to be a bit calmer, almost everything is a road car so you don't get buzzed by GT3 cars doing mid-season testing and it's easier on both car and driver as total track time is about 2.5 hours. Perfect for beginners too.
I didn't take many photos but I am always pleasantly surprised by some of the eclectic things that turn up, such as these two seen here waiting for noise testing. Sadly the TVR didn't pass so its owner joined me in the Mini for the sighting laps before heading off somewhere to find some exhaust decibel reducers.
Throughout the evening I was keeping an eye on my new front brakes and I'm pleased to say they performed faultlessly with only a little softening of the pedal but no reduction in stopping power and absolutely no juddering. Definitely worth all the aggro. For interest I wanted to understand just how hot they get with sustained use, so I parked up in a garage and got the thermometer out after a 20 minute session:
I actually recorded a higher temp of 222deg later on in the evening but didn't have the camera on at the time. So very hot, but equally still a long way off glowing like those on rally cars.
A couple of shots from the pro:
Soon though it was all over with time to take one last photo as the place emptied out.
Once again I remain amazed that a car with near 90k miles that I paid ÂŁ2k for and have only done some minor fettling to can soak up lap after lap of full throttle action without so much as a murmur of complaint. Shortly after this photo was taken I was back on the M25 cruising home with the stereo on, the air-con blowing a gentle cool breeze and not a care in the world. Great stuff.