I went over to the East coast on Friday to help a friend who had a burnt out wire in his Carawagon - turned out to be a combination of bad wiring and a faulty alternator.
The vehicle was rewired with a new loom, not by it's current owner, and it seems that as the dash clocks were mismatched, there was no ignition warning light. So the person doing the rewiring took an unfused supply directly to the alternator ign warning terminal (the alternator needs a 12V supply from the battery to excite it, usually through a bulb, to make it work).
The alternator failed, and so the unfused wire went straight to earth through the alternator diode pack resulting in clouds of acrid smoke while he was driving it
Could have been a lot worse, but he had managed to cut the offending wire and get home with it.
We replaced the alternator and wired a proper circuit through a lamp and fuse.
We then went to the Doncaster show, met up with some others, and had a great weekend
As we were leaving, another friend, who had left 10 minutes before us rang to say he was stuck on the approach to a roundabout in Doncaster, holding up the traffic, and couldn't move
Patrick shot off as he was just about packed up, and towed him to a safe place.
I followed 15 minutes later and found them removing the propshaft as it was obvious a rear halfshaft had gone (freewheeling hubs weren't locked so he hadn't been able to either move or get out to lock them as he was on a hill, and of course, the transmission brake wouldn't work with a halfshaft gone!)
We removed the long halfshaft to find the inner end missing, so also removed the other halfshaft in case any broken bits were picked up by the diff gears while driving.
We replaced the flanges and caps to keep the oil in, locked the front hubs and off he went in Hi 4WD and got home safely
As we were returning to our vehicles, Patrick noticed a small pool of wet near his back wheel, dipped his finger in, (like you do!) and determined it was Diesel. Had a quick look and we could see Diesel dripping from the pump return pipe.
As it was just a drip we set off for home, and when we got home, replaced a length of rubber tube on his tank.
So all in all, lots of LR things achieved this weekend, but one of the highlights (apart from a Spitfire fly-over) was finding they had us down in the show brochure as "The Land Rover Roving Club"
Cheers,
Robin.