Posts in Land Rover

I went to a TV4x4 event, while I was there was having fun, so I was able to select 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th, but firth and reverse were too hard against the springs with only 2″ of stick remaining. So I drove home with this bodge:

Decided that having a ball hitch is pointless. I don’t own a trailer. If I had to tow something I’d rather use the 1.6L turbo diesel Citroen Picasso to do it. Out with the old and in with the older…. erm. the pin should have a nice groove around the base for the latch part to sit into and probably also it should have a spring. But that’s for another day. At least a strop or shackle wont come off this like it might a ball hitch.

Well, we had some hot weather and I didn’t really do much worth talking about on here. I had a leaking carb bowl that caused me some head aches, but which a new gasket on the bowl and a good clean of the float needle valve seem to have cleared up. Then I wax-oil’d the chassis a bit and tinkered a little. I guess we enjoyed the sun as a family, or kept out of it depending on how hot it was. I found that the rear diff had a leaky input shaft seal. So was thinking about replacing it, anyway, one thing led to another and before I knew it we were driving to Will Shakespeare’s birth place (Stratford-upon-Avon) to pick up my birthday present from my loving wife. It’s Spanish as well, seem some use and hopefully will solve the leading diff seal issue too!! Came off a […]

I found i needed to close up the gap between the chassis leg and the bar, as there was a patch that sits proud of the chassis forward of this part. Yesterday I welded the first 40 mm or so in place on both sides then put the blow torch on it and bent it a little to close up the gap that can be seen in the picture.

I bought 2 meters of Ø16 mm mild steel round bar, cut it into 4 fairly equal lengths to be bent up into 4 hoops that can be welded to the Land Rover to make up recovery eyes. I’m not finished, but I’m getting there. Used the old blow torch to heat them up and bend them by hand, be careful to hold the cold end… Drilled a couple of Ø16 mm holes in the bit of angle that joined the chassis legs. Had to file the weld on the left a little to let the loop pass through. I have only welded the tops of one side and so still have the bottoms to do of this side and a little infill in places. That was a root weld and another in on top for good measure.

I have had no speedo for some time now, Hannah got me a cable for Christmas which I fitted some weeks or more ago. It didn’t work. I imagined that the cable was not into the gearbox properly. So today I took it out of at the gearbox end, only to find that it seemed to be right. So check I pulled it out of the speedo end so that I could see the cable end and drove a little, sure enough the cable was turning. So after some trying to get the speedo end to mate properly with the speedo a small piece of the old cable fell out of the speedo… It works perfectly now, well, as perfectly as a 66% speed speedo can. The next job for the speedo is to work out how to capture the speed and increase it by 1.4x..

Finally sealed the passenger side windscreen pane.

My new phone has a wide angle lens on it, which is fun:

This small opening was there because I wasn’t sure whether I would build up a bit here to mount additional switched into or not: But not needing any more switches I decided to run with: And this is how it turned out: I had to take the door off to drill the holes for the self tappers. This seemed a touch extreme, but I think was the best option. The other options were trying to drive the self tappers into the plastic without pilot holes using a stubby screw driver. This was going to be really hard work.