Some more armour plate

...to protect the nice, clean and repainted fuel tank. Which, as I found out, is made of steel so thin you could puncture it with a pencil. The stone guard that Solihull provide, otherwise described as the mudtrap, is actually necessary and Elly came to us without one. I wasn't too concerned about this lack of protection, given that any large rocks would be deflected by the iromongery that forms the towbar mounting, until we took the tank out to repair the leak. As I said, with the paint cleaned off and no rust you could be forgiven for thinking that it's made of aluminium since it's so light, which for steel read "thin". With that discovery in mind, I decided it needed something under it to stop even small stones from doing damage.

The price of an ally guard is quite reasonable given the consequences of a hole in the bottom of the tank, so I was prepared to get one from one of the usual suppliers. A quick look on eBay, though, turned up this:

It's hard to tell from the photo but the seller confirmed that it was bought for a TD5, is supposed to be for a TD5 but it wouldn't fit. He said that it "wouldn't clear the antiroll bar" because his Defender was modified. This sounded a bit of a mystery but with the price less than half of a new one, and it was going to get filthy within a day of being fitted, it seemed like a reasonable buy. I reckoned that I could modify it to fit our 300Tdi since the arrangements of the metalwork underneath and around the tank seemed pretty similar. I have an angle grinder, anyway, so what couldn't I do? If all else failed I could cut it into panels and bolt it to the towbar stays.

Having arranged a courier it was promptly sent, but with Christmas in the way it took nearly 10 days to reach us in Northern Scotland from Lincolnshire. I reckon it'd have been quicker ordering from Australia, but that's the price we pay for living near the Arctic Circle. Apparently. Anyway, this 15kg lump of 8mm aluminium weighs more than the fuel tank it protects, so a pretty beefy bit of kit and far more substantial that the bit of tin that Landrover call a stone guard. It also  sits well clear of the tank's surface so the usual problem of mud and other crud getting trapped and causing rust - perhaps the reason why there wasn't one fitted - is avoided.

The weather has been pretty cold, windy and generally unpleasant over the New Year so we only got around to fitting it a few days ago. As usual, it turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought, but not because it wouldn't fit the shape of the tank but because some of the mounting holes didn't match the ones in Elly's chassis. Not really a surprise, you might say, but a bit of investigation revealed that there were holes in the right places, mostly, but they hadn't been prepared (tapped) for the bolts that would be needed to hold the thing in place. Two of these are in the crossmember at the front of the tank, which isn't thick enough, in my opinion, to just be tapped to take a bolt. Since the hole didn't go all the way through and a TD5 has bolts to hold the normal tank protector in this position, I reckoned there must be, on the TD5, rivnuts (aka "Nutserts") to provide the grip. With no help available it was a bit of a struggle to get the guard in place to check how everything would line up, or not.



Heads, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes.

Having got this far I had to jam a bit of wood underneath so I could crawl out without having it all fall on me, since I couldn't reach any of the fixings.

Having drilled out the holes as accurately as possible given the lousy access I had a go with the rivnuts, without much success. The squeezy tool wasn't going to be up to the job of pulling the 8mm nuts



the normal DIY rivnut tool...



 so the alternative method seemed the best.





 With the back of the truck on ramps and me underneath I couldn't sit up and if I lay down I could only just reach the fixing holes. I tried to make a ramp for me as well, but ended up hanging off the spanners like a baboon and skinning my knuckles when the tools slipped. As they always do. I just couldn't get the rivnut to "bite" on the edge of the hole and stay in place, not that it was easy to get at anyway. After ruining 4 nuts and losing half a pint of blood I gave up and drilled right through the crossmember. Although it's bloody awkward - like all Landrover jobs - to get a nut on the bolt by feel, the front end of the new guard will be clamped by two large washers. I couldn't work out why the fixing on the guard was a slot instead of a hole since this isn't the best way of preventing it falling down, but this appears to be the way it's made. Odd.

I wasn't sure I liked it and thought we'd have to make something up that will ensure that if it is shaken down as a result of rough roads, it doesn't fall far enough to do any damage to the diff or the axle which, of course, needs to move about. It did make it easier to get in place, though.

If you try the same method, remember to put a bit of wood or something behind the crossmember so that when the drill breaks through it doesn't carry on going and (almost) punch a hole in that very thin gas tank....ask me how I know?

As you can see, there isn't a lot of room between the back of the crossmember and the tank. A bit of a pain to get in there with the nuts, too. Top tip - put them on loosely before offering the guard up to the bolts....

The cutouts in the side of the guard are to provide clearance for the towbar arms, which required a bit of gentle persuasion to fit.

Plenty of space between the tank and the guard - no mud traps here.

As a result of the tight tolerances by the time everything was back together it became obvious that these arms provide quite a lot of support to the bottom of the guard and, since the whole thing is a pretty tight fit, I decided that we didn't need to worry about the "slot and bolt" fixing on the front. I hope.


The bolts for the back of the guard matched up with those for the towbar brace - almost. A bit of filing  and drilling was needed but given how these aftermarket accessories normally (don't) fit, it went on reasonably easily, even if it did mean about 20 trips from the gravel, to the tool chest, to the bench and back again. The funny cutout that must provide clearance for something on a TD5 just happened to be just in the place I needed to put one of the fixing bolts, so I had to make up a bridge, but the other 2 went in fairly easily.

The "spacer" is a 12mm nut, drilled out

The small "collar" under the crossmember is part of the mount for a piece of steel angle that's a part of the towbar support. Since it wasn't easy to incorporate this part with the guard, I've left it off, but if I get advice to the contrary I might have to work out a way to put it back on and still have it do a useful job. This will be more difficult than it first looks as the big holes don't line up any more. At the mo, though, it seems a bit redundant.

The towbar is firmly bolted to the crossmember and the brace bars to the chassis - is this bit, which goes behind the towbar and fixes to the crossmember, really necessary?

So, a successful outcome, given that the thing I bought is for a different vehicle. Another Top Tip, though...I thought that the ARB would go across the outside of the guard but it doesn't...save yourself 30 minutes by not taking it off......😩




Elecktrikery

Time to have another go at the electrics, I thought.


The original design had the fuses for the back end located neatly Out-Of-The-Way in one of the stowage bins. So neatly OOTW, in fact, that they were damned difficult to get to if Elly was loaded. Added to that the Masterpiece of Design that now allows us to move the Engel fridge OOTW neatly denies access to them. Rather than risking a hernia trying to move a fridge full of booze and other cold essentials, the fuses had to be moved.

 This entailed removing the passenger seat, so we did a few little modifications to the fixings for that, so we could get easier access to the battery box....more of that later,

The fuse box has now been moved from the back of the bulkhead to the front. While this reduces the rearward travel of the seat by a tiny bit, the ease of access more than makes up for that. While the seat was out, another 12v socket was added to make life a bit easier under the awning.

The socket is supposed to be waterproof and it might well be, but the cover doesn't seem to be a close enough fit to keep water out, so we'll see how it performs - Amazon, standby for a complaint if it corrodes. Anyway, I took the time to label all the wires in the battery box with plastic discs or bits of tape to make tracing faults a bit easier in future. I suppose I should really make up some kind of diagram to show where all the wires are going, but for the moment the photos will do.

The biggest pain if you fit seats that don't have removeable squabs - and that's the vast majority of after-market seats for a Defender -is that access to the battery becomes impossible unless you take the whole seat out. This is a nuisance. We had a think about our arrangements and, by slightly modifying the front fixings the seat can be tilted backwards just enough to get useful access to the batteries.

I wouldn't recommend this arrangement for any complex work, but to disconnect the batteries for maintenance it'll work well enough. With this in mind I disconnected the main battery prior to trying to replace the standard 65A alternator with our spare 100A unit. Unfortunately I couldn't get the bolts undone! I dunno why they're so stiff but the effort needed to shift them was beginning to round off the bolt head on the upper bolt and the lower one wouldn't move at all. Rather than risking sheared bolts or knackered heads I replaced all the wires and retreated. We'll have a re-think on this one later.

With the electrics disconnected, though, we had a re-jig of the dashboard.

The new-look office

Gone is the "eye-level" binnacle. Everything has been moved one level down since the altimeter that was in the middle level didn't work particularly well. This clears the top of the dash and I've put the ashtray back where it came from but modified it to be the mount for the OSM- and Tripmeter tablet. 

The ashtray with a mounting plate installed

..and a backing plate to hold a small tablet

The backing plate is the one we made previously that hangs from the mirror mounting. Used this new way it can be road-legal and might mean we can get rid of the Garmin for some of the time. The Garmin is still quite useful for Olaf routes though, so we won't get rid of it completely.

The "horns" don't need to be this big so they'll be trimmed off eventually, although often when I do things like that I find that I could've found another use for the thing I've just cut up - if I hadn't been so quick with the saw. 
The ammeter still hasn't been wired in since the LEDs on the T-Max system (the blackbox-with-yellow-writing) give me as much info as I need regarding the charging process. It fills an otherwise gaping hole- like the CHT gauge -  but I'm thinking of putting something more useful in its place, maybe an oil pressure gauge. An electrical one will be fairly easy (hah!) to fit and be a bit more useful. 

The move wasn't straightforward, of course, given that it involved disconnecting, re-routing and reconnecting wires but I only blew one fuse and everything works as before. I think....

The angled mounting for the gauges lets me see the faces very easily but I think I'll have to put some kind of blanking plate over the top and maybe underneath to stop stray light leaking out.

The front work light is now, at last, wired in. I debated whether to route the wiring via a relay but as it only draws a few amps I've run the power straight through the switch. It doesn't look very bright, though.

Finally, we got around to applying some of the stickers that people in the trade very kindly donated. A big Thank You to:

and

 for their support for our 2018 plans. 

We've got quite a lot of new kit on Elly and a lot of it has come from the suppliers mentioned above.

Something's still dripping...

...and it's not melting snow.


The fuel tank leak is now top of the list for fixing and we've been running the fuel level down to almost nothing to make dropping the tank a bit easier. With all the required spare parts delivered the stage was set, then this arrived:

The view from the kitchen window suggested that this was NOT the time to be taking Elly off the road! Given that the only reason we bought a Landrover in the first place was to cope a little better with the Highland Winter snow, it seemed a bad idea to be without one now it was back.

The weather improved a bit towards the end of the week so, with a lot of care and help from Ian Watt's guys, we took the tank out...

It was almost empty and actually nowhere near as heavy as I was expecting it to be. With hindsight I could've got it out myself easily enough but the reason I didn't try was 1. the lack of decent access underneath and 2. if it had turned out to be too heavy for me to handle alone, I'd have been in a bit of a jam. I didn't fancy being trapped underneath it, trying to stop it ripping free and yelling for help that wasn't going to arrive....the garage is quite a way from the kitchen!

So, it went to the garage - and a proper ramp - to be removed. The jetwashing I'd given it to get the crud off before we took it out has succeeded in removing most of the original paint. The bare metal doesn't seem to have had any primer on it, so no surprise that it just washed off in sheets. What was a surprise was how clean the steel was underneath. In fact, not a spot of rust at all - it looked, once I'd cleaned off the rest of the old paint, like polished aluminium and probably weighed about the same, too.

The old fuel return pipe was leaking from 2 places - around the seal...

...where 2 of the fixing screws had been stripped and were basically just resting in the holes. I fitted a new seal and pipe. The old pipe was probably OK but as we were there it made no sense to refit the old one.

The vent pipe - if that what it was for - is redundant and had been "closed" with another of PITA's bodges - see the post from last summer - so we replaced our "field fix" with the proper seals.

A coat of cold galvanising primer finished the prep...

and the last job was to refit the fuel sender unit. Now, a confession...I hadn't really inspected this bit of the pipework too closely. I thought I'd found all the bodges when we removed this masterpiece of engineering from the bottom of the tank:

It's fuzzy because I was laughing too much. All the fuel hoses turned out, once we'd got them off the fittings, to be too small for the pipes that they were meant to fit. Unfortunately I hadn't noticed that the correct nuts, back nuts and olive had been removed from the sender unit and a bit of rubber pipe substituted, clamped on with a Jubilee clip. This clip was rusted solid and the attempts to free it saw the IW fitters break the pipe on the sender. With hindsight, we should've just cut the hose away. It being Friday afternoon, there was no way we were going to get a replacement sender much before the middle of the following week, so I decided to try to fix the broken one.

The remains of the broken plastic pipe can be prised out of the connector

I drilled out the old fitting with an 8mm bit having pulled out the pickup pipe. This pipe has a tiny O-ring on it, so I was able to push the pipe through the new hole and it still sealed fairly well. With enough pipe sticking through to fix the fuel hose onto, I filled the fitting with JB Weld. 

The pickup pipe pushed through the internal sleeve and bonded in place

 Putting it all back together was easy enough having given the tank a coat of black paint and some underbody sealant on the vulnerable front face. Now we come to the reason for all this work....

The serial number on the hose gives away its proper use.

This is a 120mm length of Camping Gaz hose. It happens to be almost the correct internal diameter to fit onto the fuel return pipe on the top of the tank, which is presumably why PITA chose to use it instead of spending about 5 pence on a length of the correct fuel hose. The little Jubilee clip wasn't done up tightly enough to crush the hose - a bit too big (unlike all the other bloody hoses we've changed which were too small) - onto the pipe. The hose was so loose it just pulled off. Added to that the material it was made from isn't designed to carry diesel fuel so has gone harder than bone. Not only did the whole setup leak whenever the long-range tank had fuel in it, the drips blew back along the tank to the back, collecting dirt as they went and plastering the bottom of the tank with filthy, smelly crud. After a while the whole back end stank of fuel. The leak only stopped when the level of fuel in the LR tank dropped to zero since it was now below the level of the return pipe. 3 days and a lot of effort and money to repair this silly bodge......

The "new" tank has had all the areas that are likely to leak or need monitoring moved to more accessible positions, so any future work hopefully can be done without having to dismantle half the back end of the vehicle. Another lesson learned.





Beating the Bushes.

Panhard Rod bushes. Little bits of rubber and a steel tube, all encased in a tin skin. Ought to be easy to change, I thought, until I read the Haynes Joke Book and realised that a 20 tonne hydraulic press might be a good tool to have lying about the workshop...

Yeah, OK. That aside, I decided to go ahead and try it myself. Getting the rod off wasn't too difficult but there isn't much room underneath the engine and one of the nuts was 'kin tight. There's not enough room to get a socket onto the nut so I used an adjustable wrench on that end, and a 22mm socket and breaker bar on the bolt head. Not recommended practice, but I was going to bin the bolts anyway. All out, and the bolts were "shouldered" and well in need of a change. The soft bits, once I'd cleaned the dust off, turned out to be blue Polybushes. These are often considered to be "better than the originals", partly because they're easier to fit without the need for the aforementioned 20 tonne press.





The bush at the chassis end had a tiny amount of play in it, but enough to hear a "click" when I was swinging on the rod underneath. From what I've read, this might be a source of the "wobbly wheel" we've been trying to cure for months. As the cost of a genuine new set, plus bolts, was less than getting all the wheels rebalanced, I thought it was worth a try. At a guess and based on what little reliable evidence I uncovered during the saga last year, these bushes had done about 20,000 miles.






They wouldn't push out so I burned them out with a blowlamp. A smelly, messy job but simple enough. Now to press the new ones in. Being the original rubber ones, I reckoned I could get them in using a bench vice and a couple of suitably sized sockets to do the pushing. Now, unless you've got a nice big vice, I wouldn't recommend this - as I turned the screw I could almost feel the metal wanting to explode under the pressure. However, it worked right up to the last 3mm or so, when I had to change to a slightly different diameter pusher...This then slipped and crushed the sleeve of the bush....oh dear! Or words to that effect.

Now, if I'd been anywhere remote then I'd have cleaned up the damage and carried on, but clearly not in this case. Once I'd got the damaged bush out - and this took an hour and a lot of smoke and chiselling - I was now faced with a choice - use the Polybush kit that I already had or have Ian Watt's team get another "proper" bush and press both of them in using a proper press. I chose to let the professionals do it. This involved a 48 hour delay as not one motor factor or dealer within 50 miles had another bush except the local Landrover dealer. And it cost FOUR times the price of the one I'd damaged, the alternative being to wait until I could get another by mail order.


Refitting the rod was simple enough although since I couldn't get a socket onto the nut I'd need a better way of tightening it - putting the torque wrench onto the bolt ain't a good idea. This required another investment of nearly a tenner at Halfords for a 22mm ring spanner. As there wasn't enough room underneath to get a decent swing on the thing, we had to get the front end on ramps and make a lever to put on the spanner...

...and since I didn't have a Sorcerer's Apprentice handy - Sue was busy - I needed a 3rd hand....

You can see that there's no room for a socket on the nut (at the back).

I had to guess at the 88Nm the nut needs. When I took the rod off the NS was quite loose compared to the OS, so I gave them a half turn past "V Tight" to make them "F Tight" and I think that'll do. A quick test drive and ....result! The wobble is no more! Cost? Well, given the need to buy the spanner and the very expensive new bush the bill came to very little less than if Sandy had done it all, but I've learnt a little bit more about Landrover fixing and that's always a Good Thing. He made no charge for the work he did, either. Polybushes? Despite all the hype I don't think that, in this case anyway, it's worth fitting them unless you happen to have a problem away from a decent workshop. I'll carry mine in the spares box because I won't need a press to fit 'em but I probably won't need to repeat the job for a long time yet.





Another good reason for doing the work myself is here:

This is the NS track rod end. If I hadn't been underneath doing the Panhard rod, I'd never have seen this. Given it was cold and wet I almost put this job off but eventually persuaded myself that I might as well get on with it since my hands were dirty anyway. Because at least one of these things seems to need replacing before every MoT test, I had a stock of spares on the shelf and the job took less than an hour. I'll still need to get the wheel alignment checked properly, though, since the outside of the NS tyre looks like it's getting a scrubbing, more so than the other side, anyway.




The last task was to clean off the oily gunk under the sump and oil filter. The reason for this was stated by PITA as a "leaking sump gasket". I discovered a few weeks ago that the oil was actually coming from a split in the crankcase breather hose so this has been replaced and we no longer have a little spot of oil underneath everytime I park. Cured? We'll wait and see but it looks good so far.

Oh the joy of a frosty morning and a cold spanner....

It's getting to that time of year again, cold and damp, and any thoughts of major work have been put on hold. With Elly in the garage there's only just room to close the door so working around her is difficult. However, there are some jobs that'll need doing before our trip next year so the local garage might get some more business since any major, or even minor work has to be done outside on the gravel and with little protection from the weather....

Fairly high on the Job Priority List will have to be the persistent fuel leak. Having chased this leak all over the place and sorted out various points that were clearly not as tight as they should be, we found that when we filled the long-range tank there were drips from the forward edge of the main tank. When the fuel in the LR tank dropped to about 10 litres - a guess since there's no gauge for it - then the drips stopped. Mike proved this by filling both tanks, moaned about the leak again and siphoned about 25 litres out again. I'll tell yer, sucking diesel through a plastic pipe is unpleasant enough anyway, but when you've got a beard for the stuff to splash into, well....makes a glass of wine taste a bit odd for a while. Anyway, the leak is coming from the top of the main tank where the fuel return goes in - or not, in our case. 

this diagram came from  https://www.landroverworkshop.com/diagrams/fuel-emission-systems/fuel-air-inlet-systems/fuel-tank-pump-and-mountings_53500

The cause is either a broken pipe - part 20 in the diagram, a broken seal (part 21) or a loose connection, all of which need the tank dropped to fix. With no ramp or sufficient muscle, this is a professional garage job. We'll just have to pick a time when the tank's almost empty. It's going to be expensive but the alternative is a smelly rear end, just like last time and not pleasant to sleep and eat with the smell of leaking fuel even if it's only a drip every minute or so. The fuel spreads out over the base of the tank and soaks up dust, which soaks up more fuel and so on until the whole of the underside of the tank, chassis and crossmember are thick with it. It'll be a good time to renew all the rubber pipes since they don't look too great either, and we'll do a proper job using proper parts on the tank breather (25-27) which we had to sort out in France this year.

Now that we've moved the Engel onto the "middle shelf" the Stealth Camper option is open again. With that in mind we've had another thought about blackout curtains. The curtain rod arrangement between the front and back worked but it was untidy and awkward to use. We need something that just fits onto the windows. Mike raided the scrapyard at work again and came home with a few metres of what looked like brown string. This is basically a fridge magnet - quite literally. 

If you strip the seal from a fridge door and cut it open the stuff inside is a strip of magnetic rubber that is strong enough to hold thin material against steel surfaces. Et voila! - the new blackout blinds! Made from bits of old tent - the really light stuff. The bits of Elly that aren't magnetic just had some bits of the brown string glued to it to fool the magnets that hold up the blind. If carefully fitted we've checked from the outside and no chinks of light leak out and because they're black the telltale sign that there's folk in residence isn't so obvious.
 

 We'll do something similar to hold midge netting in place as well. The doors and side windows get this treatment while the windscreen has a foil heat reflector painted black on the outer side and held in place by the sun visors. The blinds don't offer much in the way of heat insulation though, so we may still have to make some radiator foil - type liners for cold weather living.

Moving the fridge has meant we've lost the storage space for the spare gas bottle.

 We saw some very neat external carriers on some of the rigs at Stratford so we've made up something similar - but much simpler - that uses the ladder as a basic frame. The rest is made up from mild steel strip bent up on the bench and the hinge is a leftover from some DIY project.

The whole thing is rock-solid when closed with a bolt and wingnut, the other nuts are the anti-tamper square ones and there's a padlock to make sure we stay the rightful owners. With the roof tent in place we don't use the rear ladder anyway, so now it's working for a living.

The doors have had the security lock treatment but the windows are still vulnerable. Not much we can do about the front windows but a bit of work with the welding torch and Mike made up some grilles for the back that should at least make a casual tea-leaf have second thoughts. 

It was also a good time to finish off the inner door paintwork to match the outside and get rid of the previous owner's attempts to do the same but with a pot of Dulux and a yard broom. This aspect isn't really very important, but it's just a lot more rewarding to do the job properly instead of getting a little bit more irritated every time we look at something that we just didn't bother to do right the first time.



We've had yet another try at fixing the roof lining....this time we had to strip off everything previously glued - or rather, not glued - to the rear roof panels. We looked at buying some self-adhesive "egg box" sound insulation from Noisekiller but it's quite expensive and probably not very easy to clean either, so with loads of thick closed cell foam lying about we've tried again using that and some different glue.

This'll be the 4th attempt, having tried just about everything short of tile cement!

The bit over the cooker has radiator foil glued to it to provide a wipe-clean surface. We'll see how long it takes for this latest attempt to fall off!

Our requests for stickers to a number of off-road equipment suppliers has had some success. It'd be unfair to name those who didn't bother to respond - not even a "no, go away" - and that's disappointing. It might make the decision easier when it comes to spending money on replacement parts, though. Those who did respond - and some were very generous with their stuff - will get a mention at some point, either directly or in pictures, as well as some of our cash. A big "Thank You" to everyone who helped make Elly a little more "personalised".😎

Mike's been wanting to do a bit more painting - adding a stripe or two to Elly's flanks, but that will have to wait until the weather gets warmer/drier/less windy....next summer, in other words, and perhaps not even then. Oh, for a bigger garage!

....and finally....the Wobble is back. Despite having had both front wheels balanced there's still a really annoying "steering wheel wobble" at 50-55mph. This is just the speed we tend to spend most of our time. Having checked everything else, Mike is homing in on something called a Panhard Rod. I can see his legs sticking out from underneath, on the gravel, in the rain.....