1959 Land-Rover Series 2. Seating, and distractions…

If there was, like Bentley have their "percentage power reserve" gauge, a gauge that indicated "percentage road holding capability", at a standstill, switched off, with the handbrake on I think a Landy would never have the needle sitting on 100%...

Harsh. 🤣🤣

In my experience, it’s all down to tyres. Decent quality radials absolutely transform a series Land-Rover; beyond all recognition. A 109” is hugely more stable than an 88” anyway, but anyone who’s experience is limited to a few miles in an 88” on twenty year old off-road oriented crossplies would be astonished at how a 109” behaves on a decent set of road biased radials.

“The last 30 seconds in a crashing biplane” is going to be added to my descriptive lexicon however. It’s right up there with vulgalour ’s description of Land-Rover travel as “like doing 50mph in a filing cabinet”. 🤣🤣

A competently driven Land-Rover will take you places you couldn’t walk other than on your hands and knees, which is the trade off.

was reading the other day that actual MOD vehicles with the wolf wheels didnt use longer studs, they just put more ugga duggas on the nuts, and i don't mean hearsay, an actual service bulletin (thats not the same thing as me agreeing with this practice mind you. longer studs proper job)

i need to visit the brakes on mine as it keeps pulling left or right (and not consistent like youd expect with oil on shoes, it swaps sides which is odd)

Ours does this if not driven at least weekly with an odd hard stop to get some heat in them.
If you’re anything like me you probably rarely need to brake hard as the transmission and engine braking pretty much stops you anyway…
James

Got a bit of work ahead of me on the Land-Rover. It’s been doing sterling service in its usual role of “get me to work/get that junk to the tip/get big stuff home from the shops”, but my lad and I are meeting up with my sisters in Scotland early August and we have decided that we are going to “road trip” it in the Land-Rover rather than taking any of the infinitely more sensible options open to us. 🤣

Mandatory pre departure jobs include:

Oil and filters change.
Replace damaged front crank pulley (and hopefully do something to prevent recurrence of said damage).
Brake and clutch fluid change.
Adjust brakes.
Tighten steering box mounts.
Fit battery clamp I made four years ago but is still sitting in the garage while a ratchet strap does the job.
Repair bottle jack in emergency kit (or repair my small trolley jack).
Fit boost controller valve, or wind up tension on wastegate spring a bit to get the boost up to 15psi from the 12 it’s currently peaking at to see if it helps with the black smoke under power.
Replace the sliding window seals again with better quality felt as they’re already rattling like mad, particularly the driver’s side.

“If there’s time” pre departure jobs are:

Send off spare injection pump and injectors for overhaul to stock settings, then fit them with a new cam belt and fresh antifreeze.
Rebuild spare series 3 steering box and fit that.
Look at fitting second alternator or a better split charger system as the existing alternator and simple relay doesn’t keep up with demands with the vehicle doing so many short runs.

In other Land-Rover related news, I decided that I didn’t want the added complexity of aftermarket power steering, particularly since the supplier of the kit now appears to have been absorbed into a much larger concern that is no longer concerned with after sales support. Other factors included the vulnerability of the stock crank pulley (I have wrecked three now, over the last 17 years and they’ve become pretty hard to find at reasonable prices), a reluctance to re-engineer that whole drive belt setup, the fact that a Land-Rover club member wanted to buy the kit off me for what it cost me, and because the cash went a long way toward paying for my new motorcycle.

Picture of aforementioned motorcycle as I don’t have any of recent Land-Rover work because I’ve not done any. 🤣

Yep. 👍 

I’m very pleased with it. It’s pretty much perfect for the kind of stuff I want a bike for these days. Light, nimble, punchy and comfortable. My only criticisms are a headlight with a poor spread of light and an over-bright instrument panel at night. 

I had planned on building something with a similar aesthetic from the dismantled Triumph T25SS I had, but this seemed like a lot more motorcycle, for a lot less aggro, time and money. 

Today has been a mixed bag. Some of the jobs that I wanted to do went ok, others not so…

The first thing to address was the wonky bottom pulley. On my old engine I have a heavy cast and machined one, but on this engine it’s a pressed steel affair. They stick out a fair bit further than a on the standard engines, and are also bigger in diameter. This means that, under full deflection, they can clatter the front axle. Now there’s signs that my old engine’s pulley had hit the axle more than once, but it was obviously strong enough to take that abuse. Sadly, the pressed steel ones clearly aren’t, and I have wrecked a couple of them now. Time to do something about it. 






Another issue that I have been having is that the crank and water pump pulleys are 13mm wide for an “A” section belt, but the alternator has a narrow pulley on it. I have been using a narrow belt since fitting this engine and it’s been impossible to stop it slipping slightly as it’s been running on the bottom of the grooves rather than the sides. 






So first thing was to pull off the bottom pulley and work out how to go forward. You can see how the belt has been running by the way the pulley is polished and how the belt itself is worn. I took the cast pulley off my other engine and did a comparison. It’s slightly smaller in diameter, which might account for some of the damage, but it’s still going to be vulnerable. I did briefly consider using the inner groove on that second pulley, but it was going to require a custom water pump pulley fabricating, and a reworking of the alternator mount to move that back too, which I decided was simply too much work. 









So I continued to root through the stores. I found a pulley from a Defender 200tdi which was both cast and smaller diameter, so I cleaned it up and put it side by side with the Discovery one. 

With that swapped, and the spacer given a quick squirt of paint, everything went back together ok, and I was pleased to find that a stock Discovery main belt (crank/waterpump/power steering) was a perfect fit. That’s a result in itself as it means belts are cheap and easy to get.

It was at this point that things started to go less well. I wasted a good couple of hours trying to get a second alternator mounted on the engine above the first, using the original Discovery mount. This did not go to plan. Firstly I had to cut all the power steering pump mounting bits off the bracket and then, once I had got that done and a second alternator mocked up, it became abundantly clear that driving it was going to be an issue. It’s not an impossibility, but it’s either going to require fitting a double pulley to the main alternator and revising its mount so that the second groove can drive the second alternator via a short belt; or revisiting the main alternator mount rearward and driving it from the rear groove in the crank pulley, then driving the second alternator and the waterpump from the front. Either way it is too much work for too little return, particularly now as time is running out for road trip prep. So I eventually gave up on the idea completely and moved on to the next disaster of the day.

The current dipstick is a much bent affair from a Defender Tdi, and it’s too short to be able to reach easily now that it’s buried under intercooler and intake pipework.



I had found a Disco 200 Tdi dipstick that I had carefully reshaped on my spare engine so I next spent an inordinate amount of time trying to undo and remove the old dipstick. When I eventually got the damned thing off I discovered that clever me had remembered to route the tube around the end of the manifold, but had forgotten to take into account the turbo and the down pipe. Doh. So my nicely painted and prepared dipstick just would not fit no matter how much I swore at it. 😡

So I have to work out a different way to get the job done…