I did a bit of a road trip the other weekend. Up to Kettering in Northamptonshire for a few days at a mate’s.
The relatively high speed run showed up that the steering was still a bit wandery around the straight ahead position, so as I knew everything else was good I had my mate wiggle the wheel while I had my head under the bonnet looking for lost motion.
The culprit was soon identified. The four bolts securing the steering box were loose. Not falling out loose, and they took very little to nip up, but it’s not the first time this has happened over the years. I think it must have been a known issue, as Land-Rover increased the size of the mounting bolts from 5/16” up to 3/8” during the 60s. If I am honest, there’s a distinct possibility that I have a mashup of mounting hardware that has 3/8” holes in them, combined with the early steering box with the smaller bolts.
So I thought I’d better do something about it.
Or, at least, start doing something about it.
I had a rumble through my collection of knackered steering boxes. Two more early ones with small fittings, and a Series 3 one with the later size. Ideal. It sounded and felt awful though, unsurprisingly as I had been given it for free several years ago.
I have just realised that I didn’t take many pictures, because oily hands. Bear with me, I’ll take some and post them later.
So. With a suitable candidate for rebuilding identified, the first of my OCD based issues raised its head. 😱
My current steering wheel is the early “banjo” version.
I quite like it, and it’s one of the very few original parts of the vehicle as-bought in 1993, but it is very worn underneath the cover, and the professional restoration it really needs will run to several hundred pounds I can’t justify at the moment. That, plus the fact that I am unconvinced that “restoration”, despite costing so much, will amount to more than a cosmetic uplift that won’t last long given that the vehicle is a daily, not a cosseted pet never driven with dirty hands.
The early wheel is held on by a pinch bolt, and requires a corresponding column.
One of the other things that I have been slowly working towards over the years is to replace the indicator switch with the modern type that incorporates a reliable self cancelling mechanism, as well as dipswitch and horn functions; combined with a column mounted wiper/washer one. This complicates matters as the early column will need shortening to accommodate the switch; not impossible, but not really a route I want to take. The early columns use a plain tufnol bush at the wheel end, bearing directly on the inner column, and the end of the outer one would need boring internally to make it fit and it’s a whole lot of faff dismantling the casting off the other end to get the tube in the lathe.
Fortunately, the series 3 column is already shorter, because they have different switchgear, and the steering box end of the outer tube is simply held on to the cast end with a pinch bolt. Sticking that in the lathe to turn the end down to accept the later switches was straightforward.
Most unusually, stripping the Series 3 box completely revealed that it was in fine condition internally. Only a tiny amount of spalling on the replaceable outer race of the bottom bearing, and the inner races on the inner shaft, which are not replaceable and usually utterly knackered, were perfect. The graunchiness was all down to a manky top column bearing, which is cheap and easy to replace.
So, I have a steering box that will rebuild for minimal outlay, but I need to make a decision on wheels. I can use an early inner column I think, but I will have to modify it to take the later top bearing. I’ll have to buy a new one of those too, which is another hundred and fifty quid to add to the cost of having the wheel refurbished.
I do have a very good later wheel that I bought NOS a couple of decades ago, and used very briefly on another Land-Rover.
The centre horn push will be redundant. I can just use the standard Series 3 cover, or I could take the centre badge out of an old P4 wheel I found in the back of the stores…
Actually, looking at it, I could maybe mount the whole thing if I made up a suitable boss in the lathe…
What does the collective think?
Using the bits I already have involves a bit of my time, but little further outlay, and would mean that a future replacement steering box would be a standard S3 item, with just the easily swapped outer column to change. The original S2 box and wheel could either be put aside incase I ever wanted to go back to stock, or sold on.
Using the earlier wheel means probably buying a new inner column, unless one of the donor boxes yields a useable one (unlikely), plus will then meaning I’ll want to get the wheel refurbished, and I’ll have a hybrid box that will need replicating whenever it comes time to revisit the issue…
…first world problems I know, but the wheel is one of the things that you spend most time physically and visually in contact with. It needs to be right.
Another reason for keeping the older wheel is that the spokes are arranged in a Y-shape, which makes seeing the additional instruments much easier. The later wheel having T-shaped spokes puts the cross straight through the line of sight for them.
I need a bit more thinking time. 🤣
In other news, now that I have almost sorted the wandery steering, and have fitted the 300tdi manifolds, I’m getting close to fitting the power steering kit. The last part of that particular jigsaw, bizarrely, is a dipstick. I currently have a mildly contorted Defender one fitted, but it’s too short to easily reach through the intercooler pipework. The 200 Discovery version won’t work with the later manifold as it wants to go straight through the middle of the exhaust:
I could carefully reshape it, but it’s a little long, and the outer tubes are NLA…
The standard 300 one works better, but it is a push fit rather than tube nut and olive:
The push fit issue got solved by boring out a tube nut to suit:
Comparison of the inners showed the max/min marks were in the same relative places, despite the other visual differences. However, the next issue is that the mounting tag doesn’t align with anything on the 200 engine. It’s about 1/2” too high and 1/2” too far away from the alternator bracket mounting bolt though, so that’s where I thought I’d aim for.
My initial attempt at tightening the two bends in the tube to get the desired effect ended in failure, as the stiff stainless just kinked. Fortunately, these later tubes are still available, and cheap, so £10 lighter I had another go.
This time around I carefully freed up the bracket, by slicing through it, and then re-shaped it to fit. The next step will be to tack it in place, but that means a bit of practice on my TIG welder first, and I really want to get the steering box issue sorted before I do anything else.