Took the Blue Beast (97 Disco) for it's first road trip since I bought it. Overall it handles very nicely.

From my own experience working on British electrical systems from MG's, Triumphs and Jaguars I've noticed that each have their own little electrical foibles. My Disco is no exception.

First off the little red light on the factory installed radio blinks on/off while driving. When I turn on the instrutment lights I hear a faint beeping that sounds like a car horn way off in the distance, but it's behind the dash on the left side somewhere. The second symptom was when I down shifted to 3rd to go up a hill a noise started that sounded like a frog coming from the back end somewhere either under my seat or under the car somewhere. The rhythm I later noticed coincided with the blinking of the light.

My wife started to fiddle with the buttons on the radio and hit the "mode" button and a beeping noise started. She thought she had activated the self destruct mode by the look on her face. Pressing the same button again de-activated the beeping.

Now I turned on the radio and the little red light went off and so did the "horn" noise but the back light for the radio display went away.


On to the next issue: The dash lights will not come on unless I press a little rubber button on the left side of the column shroud. It seems it has its own issue, it will not turn off when I turn off the ignition and also with the headlight off it runs the city light mode for the headlights.


So what in the Sam Hill is going on here?

Side note: Before I bought the car my son had the thing and had replaced the headlight stalk with another one from an unknown vintage of disco.

 

The frog is the rear wiper, which may be jammed or frozen. The multifunction unit (MF unit) is on the back of the fuse block, and controls lots of things that use timing.

 

The rear wiper works fine and wasn't running at the time.

The MF unit, timing as in engine timing and other functions or just general purpose things?

 

Timing like lights dimming, wiper delay, etc. In the RAVE there is a page that tells you how to force it into a test mode and it will cycle each thing it controls for a few seconds. It has a sound beeper inside it on the circuit board.