Friday, 14 November 2014
4th Year MOT
Nothing much to report here. The Defender went for it's 4th year MOT today and passed without incident.
Sunday, 9 November 2014
Remote Central Locking Range Extension
Another common complaint on the Defender is that the range of the keyfob for the remote central locking is fairly poor.
My Defender does have less than ideal range and I often find myself stopping or walking back to lock the car after trying to lock it from a few strides away.
The aerial for the central locking is a normal copper wire routed to the top centre of the dashboard. A picture of the thick white wire can be seen here passing under the ducting for the heater.
The wire is fixed to the dash using a clip that slides on to an internal edge inside the dash. This took a bit of effort to remove, but it does come.
The wire is shown here after being removed, it's nothing more complicated than a piece of wire being used as a crude antenna.
The end of the wire had a bullet connector crimped to it to allow it to be extended.
A matching bullet connector was crimped to the blue wire shown here. This was used to extend the cable.
After trying a couple of different locations for a time, I found the best location for the extended wire was the A-pillar. There is already a factory loom in this location, so the extension wire routed behind the instrument cluster and up along this loom.
Putting the plastic trim back in place leaves the modification completely invisible.
My Defender does have less than ideal range and I often find myself stopping or walking back to lock the car after trying to lock it from a few strides away.
The aerial for the central locking is a normal copper wire routed to the top centre of the dashboard. A picture of the thick white wire can be seen here passing under the ducting for the heater.
The wire is fixed to the dash using a clip that slides on to an internal edge inside the dash. This took a bit of effort to remove, but it does come.
The end of the wire had a bullet connector crimped to it to allow it to be extended.
A matching bullet connector was crimped to the blue wire shown here. This was used to extend the cable.
The clip was re-attached to the wire using a new cable tie and pushed back on to the original mounting location:
After trying a couple of different locations for a time, I found the best location for the extended wire was the A-pillar. There is already a factory loom in this location, so the extension wire routed behind the instrument cluster and up along this loom.
Putting the plastic trim back in place leaves the modification completely invisible.
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