Rear window washer

When I had this car bought a few years back and made the first check ups on the car I noticed the rear window washer wasn't working. I made some quick checks but could not diagnose the problem. I recall I had the reservoir filled up with normal water as it was obviously empty but this was not the problem. There is a separate reservoir in the back of the boot. 

I now was interested to make a start to look further into this problem. To my surprise it was fully operational now. This of course had nothing to do with the fact I recently filled up the front reservoir. I'm not sure what fixed it either, perhaps one of the multiple other electrical gremlins I tackled had a positive effect somehow. In any case, I'm very pleased with this functionality. Another item of my list. The nozzle is squirting quite a firm jet on both. Maybe I only need to consider to refill it with proper window wash cleaner and a new rubber wiper. Oh well. 

Auto Perfume

Since the car is much fresher now I bought this additional air perfume as well. It was the cheapest I could find and interesting it had an Italian name and the right color to fit my car. How is that?

More interior cleaning

Last week or so I brought my daughter to her work. Something I never do but I wanted to make a testdrive :-)
So reluctantly she stepped in but regretted it as the car was smelling a bit. She was right though, it's having a bad odor despite I had already cleaned the carpet and used cockpit spray. The velour seats do look OK though but likely are the cause of the bad smell. So I had ordered this foam cleaner by Turtle Wax which comes with a nice intergrated brush. So I soaked it with foam and used the brush. What can I say, it smells so much nicer now :-)  Curious what she will say next time.

Roof trim cleaning

Whilst I had sprayed all the hinges my fingers got a bit greasy as well. So I went over the roof trim with one of my fingers and the result amazed me. It became very clean and shiny. The roof trim had become dirty and dull over the years:

So I simply tried it out on the outer piece of the trim and it transformed completely. Note its not the standard WD40 I used but the one that sprays grease:

This is how it now looks like afterwards, Difficult to judge by this distant photo but it looks so much better now. 

Squeeky boot door

Now I have worked on the boot courtsey light I had used the backdoor a few times. And it started to develop an awful squeeky noise when opening and closing. The struts were still good though. So I ended up spraying grease on the hinges, this wasn't helping though, despite they were being rusty

I also sprayed the strut arms but that wasn't helping either. Turned out it was the strut ball joints were causing it. So I had that sprayed as well and this did the trick

On this photo its more visible that dirty rusty brown grease is leaking out of it

So I sprayed up also all the other movng parts

And the locking mechanism

And the hinge of the fuel capopening was a bit rusty too but was working ok though. Nevertheless sprayed that up in any case:

And all the door hinges as well. Needless to say, all is going smooth again. Another step closer to perfection.

Boot courtesy light repair

One thing I noticed was the boot courtesy light not working. The one in the ceiling was working OK. 

I thought it would be a simple lightbulb replacement but no.

So I removed the lighthousing and checked the lightbulb. This looked fine though 12V 5W. I noticed the metal holder was slightly lose. Apparently one side had a small piece of mounting plastic broken off. So the lightbulb wasn't properly fit and a little shaky as a result.This wasn't however the cause of the light not working

Luckily the small plastic dot was still floating around in the lighthousing. So I had this glued back. On the photo you can see the red circles for demonstration purposes :-) 

The glueing thing worked out quite well, and all is firmly in position again. You can see on the next photo the lense as well which was quite dirty. So I had that rinsed with soapy water and a brush

So all is looking good and shiny again:

Even though this courtesy light has some kind of push button it does not do anything really. You can push it inwards but it will not trigger a cut off or whatsoever. Oh well. 

When I had it removed I noticed one wire end did not look original anymore. A different thick wire with a aftermarket connector:

So next I checked the light switch:

Of course it was terribly rusty and in a poor condition. When doing voltage measuring I sometimes got mixed results from nothing up to nearly 6V. When measuring directly to a proper metal ground I got 12V. When fiddling around with the connector it snapped off:

So it was very likely this connection had some mass problem. Doing further checking of the cable harness I noticed the extra black tape used as isolation. So undoing this the original mass cable (purple) came to light. I could not trace it back any further to the light-switch. I'm not sure what happened there but they have added a new bypass mass cable between the switch and the courtesy light. Typical. 

The purple mass cable still had the original connector attached to it. As said I could not trace it back to see where it stopped - it went into antother cable section into the rearbumper. To much work to dig into to make it original again. 

For now I reused the existing cabling and used new cable connector shoes. But the real issue was the broken and rusty light switch.

So I fired up a working online EPER site to look up the part details. Finding a working EPER site was a struggle as usual. Then I noticed the Kappa SW is not listed, the sedan and coupe are available though. I think this is because the SW is build by Pininfarina and as such is using their part numbers. Sigh!

So I searched for Fiat and Lancia light switches and was lucky to find it somehow. This particular switch was used on a Fiat 124 spider! Which of course is a Pininfarina design :-)   The part number was 4258476 :

The difficulty is now to find an affordable one with normal shipping costs. A lot of companies did happen to be offering this outside of the Netherlands. Some affordable but then having hefty shipping costs. So I ended buying one via Martin Willems for € 3,50  Shipping was twice as expensive. Still cheaper then driving up and down.

The one I got supplied was having black plastic though and the push pin was slightly longer as well

But it was functional and all fitted perfectly. How nice is that:

And more important, the light is now working again:

But there is still one issue with it. The used screw in the light switch, is not 100% fit. Either the screw is not original or the hole is just to wide to tighten the screw firmly. The screw is making the ground contact as the other part of the switch is touching the paint and not metal ground. Meaning a lose scew is resulting in a poor mass contact. I checked and indeed you can move the switch a little and the light goes off. The used screw is of course a bit rusty by now but I also consider it to long and doubt if it's the original one. I will have it replaced in any case.

 And so it finally happened. I had the Kappa Coupe swapped and parked. The SW is now insured and roadtax eligble. Meaning I can now use it as my daily driver. 

And the first issue occurred yesterday on my way home. One tyre was nearly flat. Despite I had them all checked and pumped up beforehand. I made it to the gasstation and pumped it up again and it remained OK since. I suspect that maybe the air-valve played up somehow when I had all tyres checked. 

Next I had filled up the gastank, emptied a bottle of injector cleaner in the tank, went through the car wash and things looked already nicer. 

Other than that it drives very nice and smooth. But the car had a muffy smell on the inside. So more cleaning on the interior had to be done today. Starting off with cleaning the front windowshield for better visibility. Cleaning the dashboard with cockpit spray. And cleaning the front carpets:

Using this interior cleaner I once bought at the Shell shop:

This worked out quite well, looking much better and fresh now:

Next I wanted to clean the pockets of both frontdoor panels as they were very dirty. And the interior cleaner was not sufficient. 

I wanted to remove these pockets for better rinsing and cleaning. You can spot them easily on the inside, both were very rusty and dirty. But once unscrewed I could not take these "pockets" out. Not sure what is holding them in. I did not want to cause any further damage.

So I instead I soaked them with vanish. 

This mostly did do the trick. Afterwards I cleaned it out further with a towel. But now all is dry again there is still dirt left. I will have to repeat this again. 

When doing a small drive again I noticed the windowwasher fluid was emptied up. So on the Shell gasstation for a fresh bottle summer screenwash. 

For now I had enough, the car is at least freshened up a little on the inside. So the next drive should be more pleasant. There is still a lot more cleaning and polishing to do. Plus tons of little repair items.