There's a little bit of a gap in this thread!!!!!
I got busy with this:
http://www.offroadexpress.co.nz/Forums/ ... 21&t=36132And then I was about to get back on to it, and then this happened:
http://www.offroadexpress.co.nz/Forums/ ... &start=150So had to rebuild a new one!!!!!!!
Now that's done, and it's ready for our trip to OZ in July, i have a window of opportunity to smash out some work on Rocky Rover.
Just to add some pressure in the mix, our property has been sold to a developer, so we have to be out by the end of June.
To fill in the gap in the thread, the fire wall was worse than we thought, so that came off too, then the engine and gearbox came out, and basically its sat as a semi rolling chassis for quite a while.
The old engine and gear box, fire wall and other parts are lurking in various corners of the work shop
We sent the front guards to a retired panel beater who tinkers with stuff from home for fun, and he fixed those up for us. They are perfectly straight. In fact he's set the bar pretty bloody high for the rest of the body work
Dad dragged the spare motor out of the crate and stripped it down. He's given it a valve grind, and a bit of a clean up in the combustion chambers, new water pump, new head gasket, pinched the copper water gallery from the old motor and swapped that in, checked the bottom end bearings and i think its ready to slap in and see what it does.
Me in the mean time, have done a whole lot of procrastinating
Over the years Dad had collected bits and pieces to do the chassis repairs.Trouble was the replacement bits were pretty tired them selves. Especially the replacement rear cross member. Luckily Rex at
www.landroverspares.co.nz had a Series 2 Rear Cross member sitting on the shelf ready to go, so grabbed that and came up with a plan to make it work.
This is the result, one farked rusty patched up cross member mercilessly hacked off and discarded
Then it was time to clean up the chassis and make it suitable to receive the new cross member:
In order to get it to this stage, this the rusty rotten crap that had to be removed. A lot of it was old patches that had been welded on, hiding a lot of good chassis underneath them. Spring perches also got cut off and chucked in the scrap:
It was a mission as I was trying to preserve as much of the original chassis as possible so I had something to weld the new cross member to. This is the pile of grinding and cuttings discs at the end
The first test fit:
The new spring perches:
A fair bit of welding later and its on. That puppy ain't going nowhere, which is especially important as the spring perches are hanging purely off the welded on cross member
Next up was this disaster. Meet one messed up gearbox crossmember. Apparently it happened coming down a hill in Maramarua forest. Judging by the damage, i would say it's the kinda hit you would remember
I made myself some space to work on it because i suck at welding upside down:
Dad had salvaged this piece of cross member from one of his mates that was doing an engine conversion way back in the day, so at least I had some thing to work with. Problem was it had been cut between the chassis rails so was way to short to be used as a direct replacement.
So i hacked the damaged piece of the chassis:
Cut a replacement piece out of the otger cross member:
A quick test fit:
Should do the trick, so blazed it in:
Following that, i hit the chassis with the wire brush and sprayed on a coat of Brunox Epoxy Rust Converter. Operation bling has begun
Will raid the old mans album and see what pics he still has of it
