Electrics and being stood for a while

[thisisnotaspoon]

So my Midget that disapeared into my parents garage about 6 years ago to do some work on the suspension has finally re-emerged , spurred on in no small part by them moving house!

Anyway, it's developed a few electrical gremlins whilst being stood for that time. Although miraculously with a hefty session on the charger on it's repair program the battery still works!

1) An occasional misfire, you can see a spark jump across the HT lead caps on the distributor when it does it. New HT leads needed? They were new-ish when it went in the garage and there's no visible damage. I'll give the terminals a smear with silicone grease and see if that solves it first. But any other ideas welcome. Distributor is an accuspark Hall effect one.

2) Pretty much every switch stopped working. It appears to just be a bit of corrosion on contacts, so a bit of a clean and lots of switching sorted them and a smear of grease might help.

But that got me thinking, every bit of wiring you can see on the car is corroded, and the wires quite brittle, no sparkly bright copper anywhere. Now my meager understanding of electrics says this is a bad thing for conductivity at terminals and in switches especially. One of my planned upgrades was to halogen headlights and to fit relays with heavier gauge wire to get a few more volts to the bulbs themselves. But I was told the resistance of contacts drops when current is applied, so will I just find that by fitting relays and replacing ~10A from the switch with a few mA that they stop working anyway?

Same possible problem when replacing indicator, brake, tail, reverse lights with LED's, no point swapping ~45W of bulbs for 5W if the switch stops working.

Anyone done either of those things and had a problem? Having only just got it back on the road I really don't fancy doing a wiring loom replacement!

Edited by thisisnotaspoon on Thursday 16th January 10:28

[Flying Phil]

I have had cars stored for a lot longer! Yes there will be odd problems but replacement of the whole loom is unlikely to be needed (and it is not too difficult anyway.
Often just getting it running around will cure problems as the vibrations act to clean up stuff - sometimes!

[thisisnotaspoon]

Yea it all works, just a bit intermittently sometimes and the connections look bad. Ive been arround and cleaned everything accessible and given moving parts a smear of silicone grease. Will see how it goes in the summer.

[Flying Phil]

Glad that you have got it (Mainly) sorted.

[v8s4me]

Hello "...spoon" - I was wondering how you got on with sorting out your post storage issues. The reason for asking is that I'm thinking of buying a Midget and given my budget it's likely to be one that might need some re-commissioning. Any other tips on what stops working after a period of storage would be helpful. Presumably the place where yours was stored was a bit damp and that's caused the corrosion issues with your wiring. How did the rest of the car fair?
Thanks in advance.

[thisisnotaspoon]

v8s4me said:

Hello "...spoon" - I was wondering how you got on with sorting out your post storage issues. The reason for asking is that I'm thinking of buying a Midget and given my budget it's likely to be one that might need some re-commissioning. Any other tips on what stops working after a period of storage would be helpful. Presumably the place where yours was stored was a bit damp and that's caused the corrosion issues with your wiring. How did the rest of the car fair?
Thanks in advance.

Hi, sorry I didn't reply sooner I hadn't checked the forum for a while.

The garage it was stored in was well ventilated so doesn't suffer condensation (there's a substantial gap between the walls and the roof, and above the top of the doors) which is a good thing but the corrugated concrete roof (not asbestos, but whatever replaced it) deposited a layer of dust which marked the paint a bit (presumably it's quite alkaline). I managed to mostly correct it with some Farcela G3 Pro paint renovator on the affected panels and had to use scratch remover on a few stubborn bits. Once Waxed you would have to look pretty closely to spot the stains.

The worst type of garage is those lockup style ones you see on 50/60/70's estates away from the houses. The roof's have had the lead nicked so leak like a sieve but they're sealed enough turn into a humid box when the sun hits them. You either want a completely dry one at a stable temperature (i.e. inside/attached to the house), or a very well ventilated one that lets the damp air out.

My to-do list was:

Rebuild suspension with new springs, damper and polybushes. This was the reason it went into the shed and never came out (it was at my parents so wasn't easy to work on).

Rebuild the brakes and wheel bearings (this was needed anyway).

Replace original sealed beams with quadoptics and Osram LED Bulbs. Not cheap or legal for road use, but unlike cheap LED bulbs (and even the sealed beams) they give a really sharp cut off and loads more light (and only draw 1.2A each!).

Replace tail/brake bulbs with Osram LED's, and sidelights. The current drain with ALL lights on is now about the same as the indicators!
One job I hadn't considered but thought about whilst the lense were off was polishing the reflectors inside the rear lights with autosol, this actually made a massive difference!

Indicator flasher relay had died, I could (should?) have taken the opportunity to replace it with a LED compatible one but didn't.


Screenwash had turned to jelly, fixed that by:
1) Remove the tank (rubber belt snapped when removing it so had to order one of those too) and drain the contents, clean it thoroughly and with hot soapy water and re-install with fresh water (no soap at this point)
2) Remove the strainer from the suction hose.
3) Disconnecting the hose to the pump under the dashboard and attaching a 25ml syringe to the pipe, suck and blow until the fluid is moving freely (it looks like thick blue monster vomit with black chunks in it), draw through a couple of syringe fulls of fluid until clear-ish water comes through). And re-connect to the pump.
4) Pump through water until bored or your thumb gets sore.
5) Remove and discard the water in the reservoir and re-fill with screenwash (I always use the neat stuff, it uses so little compared to an electric pump that it's pointless economising, and it'll clear the screen better.

All three dashboard switches had corrosion on the contacts. cleaned off with a flat screwdriver and wire wool and given a dollop of silicone grease. They had also gone a bit brittle so are now held together with gorilla tape and on the list for replacement.

Indicator stalk came back to life with some repeated flicking on and off until it reliably made contact.

Fuse holders had the same problem (wire wool + a bit of silicone grease again).

The battery was dead (and vented a load of acid when I tried to charge it).

The engine ran rough for the first 10 minutes with clouds of smoke as I'd put a few CC's of oil in each cylinder before storage. But seems otherwise fine. I've filled it with some cheap 20W50 and a new filter just for now to flush out any nasties but will replace with classic oil before actually driving any real distance.

Carburetors work (I've driven it to the garage for some other non-storage related work), but leak, that's next on the list.

So yea, 90% of the problems have been related to electrical connections. Over the winter I'll probably spend a day re-terminating every push-on connector and installing them with a smear of silicone grease so it doesn't happen again, £10 in parts and half a days work should buy better reliability! Brakes would probably have needed doing as they'd been stood for so long. Carb's likewise (they needed a rebuild before storage and definitely need it now).

If you're on a budget then just pick the project that you can manage. Some people will be a wizz with welding, or bodywork, or have the tools/inclination to strip and rebuild bits of the engine or drivetrain. There are two ways of looking at it, either:
a) You spend way more than your budget, and get unknown problems anyway.
b) You stick to your budget, get one with a known problem that will take you over budget, then deal with the unknown problems anyway

I used to tell people it was completely reliable, it just cost me an equal amount in TLC and spares as it did in petrol! The heavier your right foot the more it costs in both!