Was original Minor wiring "Colour Coded" ?

[Sam Christie]

This is simply a question asked out of curiosity but was the original wiring on Minors colour coded?

[halbe]

Hello Sam,

All the wiring on my car (29 fabric saloon) was in black.
No other colours whatsoever.

Kind regards,
Halbe

[Ian Grace]

Agreed - the same on my fabric saloon, McEvoy and all other original Minors I have seen.

I'm actually looking into wiring for the Tiger Moth at the moment - the original was like the Minor- cotton-covered, but it was all yellow. Unfortunately, you can't use just any wire in an aeroplane, so the fix is to use modern aircraft wire (which is much thinner, and white) and cover with yellow heat shrink. It would be nice to get some yellow cotton covered wire, pull the wire out and slide in the modern aircraft wire, but I'm not sure that is possible.

[peterb]

Some early Minors just had coloured sleeving on the ends of the leads

[Toby]

How come I have colour coded wiring diagrams for sv minors in my pitmans book of the minor and service sheets???
32 cammy wiring diagram in service sheets has colours for cables but 32 onward sv cars have colours plus a note that the colour is the colour of the sleeving on the end of the wire. Does that actually mean a short sleeve or the insulation, surely it would have been tricky to do it without coloured insulation?

[Ian Grace]

I'll take a close look at the original McEvoy wiring tonight which should confirm the wiring colours at least up to 1933. Has anyone else got any coloured original wiring on their Minor?

[Ian Grace]

Well, it looks like OHC Minors had black wiring, and SV Minors had colour-coded wiring, but...

I have added a new page to the Members' Area of the website and added the 1929 OHC and the 1931, 1933 and 1934 SV Minor wiring diagrams. All three SV diagrams indicate colour coding.

Looking at the Pitman diagram, this is identical to the 1933 diagram, but Pitman adds the note that 'Colours indicate sleeving on the ends of leads".

Looking closely at the wiring on the McEvoy, some of the wires have been replaced by coloured, plastic wire, but all of the original cotton-coated wiring is black, and I cannot see any coloured sleeves.

So the question becomes - did any SV Minors actually have coloured wires, or were they just fitted with colour-coded sleeves, as Pitman's suggests.

I don't have a 1932 season SV Minor handbook - if anyone has one and can provide a high resolution scan of the wiring diagram, I'd be most grateful. Also, is there a wiring diagram out there for the LWB OHC chassis? Finally, the M Type handbook doesn't include a wiring diagram, but Blower includes diagrams for the M Type, the M Occasional Four and the D Type, which I will add to the new page shortly.

[Ian Grace]

So as I mentioned, I'm looking at the three wiring diagrams in Blower - for the M, the M Occasional Four and the D, and wondered whether there is some subtle distinction between an M Occasional Four and a D. So I asked Ted Hack, and here's his reply:

Hi Ian,

Quick answer – I don’t know! I’ve noticed this M Occasional Four diagram before but not thought anything of it - not being an expert on M. But I think Blower is wrong, I don’t think there was ever an M four seater, occasional or otherwise. The Occasional Four was the D type. In those early days these cars were known as ‘Midgets’, not so much as M or D; letter designations only became important later on when various other Midgets appeared - particularly the Js.

So I think the Occasional Four is the D Midget and the two-seater was the M, but because the D was known at the time as the ‘long chassis Midget’, rather than the D, someone has recorded accidentally an Occasional Four M!

Incidently I have a very old friend (well into his 80s) who met W.E. Blower a couple of times or so at the factory (I think he, Blower, worked in Service reception/Warranty office or similar, post war.) before Blower went to the States to live. Hence the subsequent ‘Blowers’, soft backs, were published in the States.

Hope to get a few more Ds to Prescott next year but we are a bit spread out! The date is already on our website diary page.

Regards,
Ted

Can any of our M owners say more?

[Toby]

I have a diagram in my ohc service sheets for the family 8

[Ian Grace]

Thanks Toby. I thought I had one somewhere downstairs too, but if you saw the stuff in our basement, you would realise that I thrown NOTHING away, but this means that I can rarely find ANYTHING I look for! We just finally retrieved the rest of our stuff from our House in Michigan in early October, plus I have three of the Tiger Moth wings and all the tail feathers, etc. down there, so if you could scan and e-mail, I*'ll add it to the collection on the website.

I also want to do the same for the lubrication charts in the various handbooks and generally expand the SV content of the Members' Area, as much if its content goes back to the early days of the Register when we were primarily an OHC Register. There is a ton of SV stuff in the Strickland Archive, but it is probably time to reorganize the Members' Area content more logically across the Minor and M models.