MoT

It’s that time of year again…

For those of you outside of the UK, the MoT is the annual safety inspection carried out on behalf of the Ministry of Transport for all road vehicles over three years old.  Naturally, it couldn’t go entirely without a hitch.

The MoT was at 10:00 this morning, but on the way home from work at just after 22:00 last night, the left head light failed on dipped beam.  I decided to rectify it on reaching home because the weather forecast for this morning was heavy rain.  I replaced the bulb (a five minute job with my modified headlight bowls), but this changed nothing.  I pulled out the multimeter and started checking for a break in the wires, but had a steady 11V (engine off) at the bulb connector.  However, with a bulb fitted and fiddling with the wires, I soon found the break.  The dipped beam wire had snapped completely just inside the tailed grommet in the light bowl.  It’s an awkward place to work on in the dark, but I was able to repair the wire with a soldered and sleeved joint, all wrapped in heat-shrink tubing.

I also reconnected the original windscreen washer jets as the new RRC heated jets didn’t work out – at anything over 20mph, the airflow around the bonnet carried their spray out at 90 degrees.  They didn’t get a drop on the windscreen, but would be ideal for soaking cyclists, so it wasn’t a complete failure!

Thankfully, having repaired the headlight, the MoT went perfectly smoothly – not a single fault was found, even when I asked if there was anything minor that may need looking at in the future.  Oddly, the modification that seemed to most impress the inspector, maybe because he has been testing this vehicle for so long and is used to all the others, was the fitting of the wheel chocks; I removed them from the roof rack when the roof top tent bag was repositioned to the front end, and eventually settled on fitting the chock brackets to the chassis between the outriggers, keeping them accessible but well out of harm’s way, sticky fingers and out of the airflow.  Maybe he was just surprised that a car owner uses chocks for jacking, but they’re very useful things to have.  They also seemed shocked at how effective the brakes were on the roller test, even though they weren’t even fully applied, but I suppose they’re used to seeing old Land rovers with poor brakes and sloppy steering.

Anyway, that’s another year’s ticket at a cost of £47, with the RRC is due in spring and the Lightweight in the summer.