The grey MK1 project progress hit a brick wall and stopped as I tried to get the windscreen wipers operational. I should have woken up that there was something pretty wrong when I saw the flexible drive cable from the wiper motor to the wiper arm gearboxes disconnected and I also had noted that an attempt at a roadworthy a couple of years ago resulted in a failure because of inoperative wipers and body rust. [The rust is all gone now.]

Removing the Lucas DR3 wiper motor revealed a lack of brushes and some pretty amateur soldering of new flying leads into the motor itself. By luck I had another wiper motor that had a seized armature bearing and I was able to use the field windings and brushes to get a basically serviceable motor running on the bench. But the wiring colour code seemed to be wrong and I could not for the life of me make out the switching system to get the two-speed operation. There are 6 wires running into the motor with the colours of red, green, blue, brown, white and yellow

I resorted to the internet to attempt to sort out the colour codes however there was nothing about internal wiring of DR3 wiper motors but the mention of the name " Lucas" certainly brought a number of jokes about the "Prince of Darkness".

Finally I pulled the top off the wiper motor in one of my other MK1s and established the correct colour codes. Whoever had installed the new leads had certainly got it wrong as only two colours of the 6 wires were correctly terminated I then connected the motor to the car system and all hell broke loose as the supply fuse got blown. What now? A crawl under the instrument panel revealed that in the past some one had installed a wire to run 12 volts from the fan switch to the wiper switch. That is not how it should be done and when the wipers were turned on the 12 volts was being taken straight to earth.

Obviously the system needed to be restored to original specifications and the wiper system is now working. I will do a diagram of this wiring in the future as the leads on these motors are now typically 40 years old the colour on the original wiring has completely faded out and anyone wanting to overhaul one is going to have difficulty without "the knowledge"