Range Rover Classic Heater Fan Resistor Replacement
A famously failing part that you may find yourself in bad need of replacing is the dread Fan Resistor. The symptoms are usually your fan either
completely quits or only has one or two speeds. Like off and full on in my case. The fan resistor is located in the front air dam of your Classic.
In the passenger side vent. You can see exactly why it fails when
you look at the picture and see the second bane of the Land Rover family....rust.
The new part is a "solid state" version of that OEM part designed by Atlantic British. There may be
other providers of this part but AB is who I buy from usually. I happened to get this part off of
Big Jim who had purchased it to repair his Classic before he wrecked it. Otherwise
I would have ordered it from AB. This is the Part Number.
You will have to remove the plastic vent and the pollen filter to get to the region where the resistor is located. Be very careful with the grill
as it is old and plastic. It may break. The in between beauty pieces will possibly also come out when you get the grill out of the way.
Located in there is also the grommet that plugs the hole where the wires run. You can see that here in
this picture. The instructions call for you to pull on the wire and
unless the plug is zip tied into the dash it will come out. Now I don't think I used any zip ties when I put my heater core box back in after the
heater core replacement project. So no matter how much I pulled I wasn't getting any where with
the plug showing up. It's worth a try, I guess.
Since it did not come out of the dash as described in the instructions. I was forced to take the dash apart. I'm an old pro at this by now. So it
wasn't anything for me to pull off the parts to open the dash enough to get my
hands inside. I was almost willing to cut the wires and attempt to match
them up and splice the new resistor pack on to the old wires. But not having a wire to wire comparison I proceded to take the dash apart. And I didn't
have any heat shrink tubing at this time. Now, since you are here and reading this I will let you in on the secret wiring of the plug.
I took some pictures of the plugs and with a little effort you could match up your wires and do the cut. If you do this splice, be sure to
use some heat shrink over the splices. Always better safe than sorry. These were the wire colors on a 1993 LWB. I make no guarantees that
Land Rover used the same color wires on your Classic. So good luck with that.
Okay back to the dash disassembly. It's pretty straight forward. Unscrew the screws along the bottom of the wooden AC vents. Remove the AC vent louvers.
Carefully remove the plastic frames. I say that because being rough here can cost you a bit of the veneer. Inside each vent is two screw that connect
the wood to the top of the dash. You should remove the air hose from the far right defroster vent. Mine has a screw that holds the hose
to the fitting but yours may not. Once all of these are removed you can lift the dash apart enough to get
your arms inside. One more pic
without my hands in the way.
It pinches a bit and it's very tight work but very doable
with the right mind set. You are now feeling for this plug. The
freaking bastard plug, er uh I mean, the sweet pluggy goodness is in behind the two defroster hoses that feed the center defrost vents. As you
can see there are the colors of the wires if you were still thinking about cutting yours. I'd like to take this time to thank Mrs. OkieRover
for taking the pics while my hands were busy holding and demonstrating.
Once you get the plug I had my wife watch to make sure the plug I was fiddling with actually was the correct one. I believe there is only one
plug in that area but I wanted to be sure. Once I got that far I popped the grommet and fed the new resistor's wires down to the plug inside
the dash. You can see here the new resistor pack is in place.
Now the arduous task of lining up the two plugs with out actually looking at them began. I got it correct in about 10 minutes and got them
connected.
You can see in this picture the support bar rivit failed.
In fact I removed all of my grills and each of the bars had one side failed. Also the pollen filter was pretty knackered and I will be replacing it
with some mesh when I reinstall. So with the bars busted I broke out the rivit tool
and secured them all back in place. I moved the bar down to accomodate the new resistor and fitting the screw through the bar. I drilled it and used
the screw provided. You will have to move the bar a bit down to allow for clearing the other parts in there. I also installed the new resistor pack
upside down so that any water that gets in there will not "sit" in the resistor tray. It shouldn't matter either way but I was imagining the mud
many of you expose your rigs to and thought about that mud sitting on my new resistors. The final resting place of the
secured resistor pack here.
Button everything back up and your done. Be sure and test it before you reassemble.
On the OkieRover Difficulty Scale I would rate this a solid 2. Maybe a three if you are
intimidated by the dash disassembly. If you cut the wires this project is a 3.
Thanks for reading and happy Rovering.