The Little Discovery That Could (financially ruin me)

That’s good to know, thanks one less thing to worry about for a minute then.

Expensive day today, sold my soul to Sally for £780 and got a half frame ordered up from Dixon Fabrication including the rear body mount outriggers. (yes, the non-galvanised one, i know, i know my soul isn't worth £900 plus £95 postage...)

Also booked 3 days off (plus the weekend) from work in the middle of October to fit it.

Some questions, any advice would be gratefully received:

1) As it's a body-off job by the looks of things, how should I go about supporting the body to lift it off? I've ready access to forklifts, mobile cranes and associated lifting equipment but unfortunately no 2-post lift. Is there an accepted method for safely lifting the body without a lift specifically? two forklifts? spreader bars? Lifting points? club the windows out and use slings??

2) Some advice for rust prevention and paint, as it's untreated steel I would expect to use a few coats of zinc primer and then a few coats of some underguard tough paint, OR the 2-part U-pol raptor polyurethane, unless someone has a better Idea? I am not a painter as you can probably tell...

3) can anyone recommend a cavity wax or equivalent treatment I should be looking at applying before/after welding?

4) General advice? Help?

Thanks!

I don't think you would need to lift the body off, I've only done a 1/4 chassis on a 90 and disco 2 in the past and didn't need to lift the body. Just undid the body mounts and cut chassis off where needed (obviously removed fuel tank and and other bits first). However I'm not sure where the join is on a half chassis so access to the top weld might be tight.
Once you have the old chassis section off you use the body mounts to line the new one up, then tack it on. If you need to lift the body for access I would loosen the front body mounts and lift the arse end up.
I used acroprops and bottle Jack's to lift my shell up, you don't need a post lift although it would have been nice

Did a few little bits today.

Fitted my dashcam what for the plausible deniability:



Changed out the worn ball joint on the end of the drag link that was causing the vague steering:



and found this perfectly good bird that someone had put in the bin.



The other evening I dropped the axle oils. The rear came out looking great, but not a great deal came out of the front and it was pretty minging, plenty of glitter but no big chunks thankfully.

I could see that the offside axle seal had been weeping so I ordered one and topped the front axle off for now.

Which all immediately came out and got slung all over everything



Oh well, got to wait for the new seal to show up this week.

Also noticed I've got free play at the pinion and more gear oil leaking out:



Having a search around it looks like the pinion has a pair of taper roller bearings and a seal. Does this axle use shims to set the pinion gear engagement? Can I adjust the bearing preload to take the slack out and just fit a new seal?

Thanks for your advice!

Coming up next in the "Lipstick on a Pig" playlist: Yesterday I got a blinding deal on a nice set of steelies and tyres, waiting on the proper tapered wheel nuts to fit them.

I admire your tenacity. I would have torched it by now.

Tango91 said:

^^ Ominous foreshadowing.

A cautionary tale for you folks tonight.

So, did you ever have one of those days? I've got a double gin on the go and more looks imminent so I shall explain.

I learned a few things today.

First was that there's a special place in hell for whoever decided to put those stupid chrome caps on the wheel nuts and cutting the damn things off so I don't have to hammer on a socket every time is quite high up my priority list.

Second, My disco apparently has one of those fancy transparent anti-roll bars in the back with the bluetooth drop links. Which would explain why the door handles drag on the pavement when you go around a corner. (Is that an MOT failure?)

I guess that's on me for not checking but in my defence, I've not owned one of these before so I didn't notice it by it's absence. Oh well.

Third, the rear chassis legs don't look too bad behind the spring perches. Which is nice.

View attachment 273671

Unfortunately things go downhill a bit here

The front of the chassis seems to be in excellent (if muddy) condition. But from the body mounts in front of the rear wheels to the bracket for the watts linkage...

View attachment 273672

Oof. Once you start with the needle scaler there's no going back.

Liz Truss said it's disgraceful that we import cheese, but let me tell you, there's some bloody fantastic aged swiss made in Solihull right here.

I guess that would explain the lack of ARB, the mounts are... not.

The rot is on both sides of the chassis leg and on this outer side it goes all the way to the body mount outrigger, which it has also eaten part of. I can only assume the spring perch was the only thing holding the back of the car on.

This was at about 10am this morning, (Sunday) and up until this point I'd been having a reasonable day.
I'd just bought some cans of zinc primer and stone guard paint in anticipation of a straightforward patch job. (Ha!)

Now, A dilemma.

it's taken me 301/2 years to get myself the land rover I always yearned for and here it is. And after this, her indoors won't entertain the thought of another one. So I browsed around a bit looking for a hitman for hire but they all cost more money than I've got.

I could sort of see which way the wind was blowing and I know you can get a half-chassis for about a grand or so, which I also do not have the money for at the moment, because adulting is hard. So I'm going to have to save up for a few weeks. So this one needs to not snap in half for a few weeks until I'm less poor.

Right. A Plan.

So off I went. I'm lucky to have the use of the workshop at the yard where my crane is based, and I know where the fitter hides the keys to his snap-on toolboxes.

You probably know the drill, cutting out rust, grinding, cardboard template, cut the metal, fit it, change it, start again because you ballsed it up, tack it in, blow holes through the rust you're trying to weld to, cut it back some more, have a drink, another template, etc.

View attachment 273674

Mercifully, the bottom of the box to the left hand side of the welded seam was pretty solid for most of it. Here I'm replacing the bottom and corner with a section cut from some ~2mm walled box section.
Please excuse the welds, I am not proud and welding to rusty metal is not my forte.

View attachment 273675

That went in... okish except for at the back where the chassis section that went inside the spring perch is just completely gone.

I took a break for a cup of tea and to rock backwards and forwards in the corner while hyperventilating for a few minutes, which i always feel does you a world of good.

I cut a lot more rot out of the side of the chassis leg, the spring perch, and the shock mount which was skeletal at this point and started roughing out the side, working forwards to where it was less bad.

View attachment 273676

Again, please excuse the fugly welds, i swear I can run a nice bead on clean metal that isn't upside down two feet off the floor. Note the shock mount trapezoid-skeletal-thing that's all that was left after a good scaling.

View attachment 273677

After these two, I added one more of these thick (~5mm) plates, which i neglected to photograph, that slid in under the remains of the shock mount and tied into the not-entirely-awful "metal" that headed off down to the body mount outrigger. This bit had a few small holes in it so for good measure I added a thin ~1.5mm plate to the outside of it just in case.

View attachment 273679

Also filled in the bits I had to cut out of the spring mount there where the ground lead is clamped on.

I would have taken the shock completely off but the top bolt just felt 'wrong' despite moving which set off alarm bells; I was NOT in the mood to try and extract broken bolts from mission critical systems at this point in the proceedings.

I tidied up a few bits, added a bit to tie the bottom of the member to the reasonable metal where the watts linkage bracket was somehow still existing and whole.

Then I gave it a coat of zinc primer because we wouldn't want it to RUST now, would we?

View attachment 273680

So not wonderful but hopefully less ticking-time bomb. I didn't even attempt to start on the inside of the chassis leg or, god forbid, the other side because a) It was about 8.30 pm and b) I'd learned my lesson and put the needle scaler back in the drawer. And c) because I don't dare at this point.

I tidied up and drove it carefully home, and when I went inside, brown from head to toe from the rust and dust and grinding and looking like a puppy that had been kicked, my wonderful, understanding SO who I do not deserve asked very diplomatically how bad it was, then told me i was an idiot and that she'd told me so and how much was a half chassis for the damn thing because I couldn't be running around in a screaming metal death trap.

I wasn't expecting it but she took pity on me (I really don't deserve her) and offered to lend me the bulk of the money for a replacement half, but she did take great pains to emphasise again that she'd told me so and she was right about the Jimny blowing up as well and that my next car would be a boring economical box and I wasn't even listening so why bother.

On the upside, i got some nice Pioneer speakers out of the jimny and fitted them in the disco to replace the broken front door speakers. So overall a good day

Now I guess i need to go very carefully over the chassis to find out where the good bit starts and order the corresponding length replacement, which i suspect will include the rear outriggers.

I'm starting to think that the key to Land Rover ownership is a strong relationship. Or living in Dubai or something, I dunno.

Please send help.

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Loving this so far, i feel your pain also in a similar but slightly less rusty situation (only slightly!) as yourself. My misses isnt 100% on the Disco so all these small (at the moment!) jobs really dont help with matters! Good job so far ill put pics of my welding up soon enough you'll feel much better!

DanClarke said:

I admire your tenacity. I would have torched it by now.

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I just can't get it to stay lit, any tips?

I forgot to mention, on Sunday morning i got a bit of time to go down a favourite green lane and scratch the paint up a bit more. As it turns out a disco is wider than a Jimny!




AND IT DIDN'T SNAP IN HALF!

Picked up these steelies over the weekend. Not everyone's taste, i know, but I like them and I don't like alloys on a 4x4.
Four with decent BF Goodrich KO2 235/70R16 and a spare with a new Michelin. I paid £250 for the lot, which considering these tyres are ~£180 each new...



The old ones are a bit big for the rims I think?



And the new ones fitted. Definitely shorter but I don't mind. All in good time.



The spare had a broken valve stem so I used the ol' 60-ton mobile press to pop the bead off



The seller was a top guy and was nice enough to throw in some LED lights he'd taken off his nice Disco:



I just looked on ebay and those big ones are £186 new! Result!

Tango91 said:

Picked up these steelies over the weekend. Not everyone's taste, i know, but I like them and I don't like alloys on a 4x4.
Four with decent BF Goodrich KO2 235/70R16 and a spare with a new Michelin. I paid £250 for the lot, which considering these tyres are ~£180 each new...

View attachment 274396

The old ones are a bit big for the rims I think?

View attachment 274398

And the new ones fitted. Definitely shorter but I don't mind. All in good time.

View attachment 274399

The spare had a broken valve stem so I used the ol' 60-ton mobile press to pop the bead off

View attachment 274400

The seller was a top guy and was nice enough to throw in some LED lights he'd taken off his nice Disco:

View attachment 274401

I just looked on ebay and those big ones are £186 new! Result!

View attachment 274402

Click to expand...

Bargain I'd say, ive got alloys on mine and agree with you 100% id swap for steelies

A productive day with the Disco today, I'm pleased.

Had the front end apart to replace the noisy diff with the buggered pinion bearings and leaking seal. It almost went off without a hitch, she didn't fight me, nothing broke or stripped and for once I have less expensive problems than I started the day with.



I took the side with the leaking half shaft out first, I have to say the hubs and knuckles are (from a maintenance standpoint) are a great design and way, way, way better than any of the other cars I've owned or worked on. The missus had a Chevy/Daewoo Matiz and to change the front brake rotors you had to press out the wheel bearings.

The Disco in comparison seems like adult size Lego and everything just unbolts and comes apart, I'm suitably impressed.

The seal I pulled out of the end of the axle was nowhere near close to fitting around the shaft.



I've not worked on these axles before so the penny didn't drop until I pulled the other side as well:



There's your problem, lady. The diameter of the top hat sealing surface is 35mm but the diameter of the shaft without it is 32mm.

I don't know why (or how) someone got that top hat bit off there and it makes my head hurt to think that someone with the ability to get to this point looked at it, thought "You know what, this is fine" and reassembled the axle.

So I booted up Baby's First Lathe and got to work. I found a nice bit of seamless tube made from stainless of some sort that was almost the right external diameter, checked it against the new axle seal and got to work boring it out.


My lathe is not really man enough for this but carbide insert tooling and lots of cutting oil got me there.
In the end I scrapped the bit in the photo and started again with a longer piece, because the walls were thin enough to be deformed by the chuck jaws gripping it, I should have thought about order of operations.



I made it to be what I believe proper engineers call an 'interference fit' on the wider bit of the shaft there, gave it a bit of loctite for luck and bashed it into place with the side of the jaws of an adjustable spanner, because I'm a real pretend hobby machinist not an engineer.



I'm very pleased with how that turned out (get it? ) but I would have liked to have started with a thicker pipe as it was smaller diameter than the real top hat bit (34mm instead of 35mm)

In the end, it was what I had at hand, it was stainless, and beggars can't be choosers, it's Sunday, etc. etc....

Hopefully the new seal, er, seals properly over the slightly smaller collar and the oil stays IN the axle this time. (So far so good at the time of writing).

I picked up a good used front diff on ebay as the one on there was making a hell of a noise and I couldn't turn the radio up any more. It came on an adorable little pallet in a box that looked like it had been through the wringer. Thanks, DPD.



It was fine though, i gave it a good clean out with brake cleaner and the air line.

Not much damage to see on the old diff, the pinion bearings are dickered, but I haven't investigated too hard. The gears themselves don't appear to have any damage so I might risk trying to rebuild it in the future.


True to form for this damn car there was no proper gasket between the diff housing and the axle, just RTV silicone, most of which was inside the axle.

Reassembly went as quickly and smoothly as I could hope for and was actually a satisfying process with minimal scraped knuckles and swearing.



New diff, who dis?

I can hear myself think now when I drive it, which is nice, and the lack of slop and crashing and banging in the driveline when you pull away or change gear is noticeable.

Finally, I can get to worrying about all the other noises that up until this point I couldn't hear now

Next project might well be the half chassis but I'm away for a few weeks with work so we'll see.

Cheers!

Brilliant, really enjoying this thread.

If your anti roll bar bits are all connected then they must all be up to MOT spec. IF however, the drop links aren't connected, then it's just a bent piece of metal, which as long as it doesn't fouls anything isn't motable. They aren't actually required for an MOT. They were removed from my 90 before i bought it. That coupled with the fact it was raised a couple of inches with soft springs made roundabouts a lot of fun. In fact it handled on road very similarly to my Citroen Dyane but a lot quicker...

Still waiting on the half chassis.

Designed and ordered a custom sticker for the old girl, took an age to arrive.



And I was driving back in the rain last night and the temperature gauge decided it was both overheating and in siberia. Turned it off and on again and it was right back in the middle where it belongs.



Water in the sensor wires?

Roll on the end of the month...

Could also be water on the ECU's/IDM (internal fuse box which is a hybrid jobbie) check for wet carpets in the footwells... The bulkhead likes to rust through were the inner arch meets it, and depending on whether it's had a replacement windscreen a past fitter might have not sealed things correctly..

Your missus loves it really as it gives her peace. Good read and good luck.

Hello, it's me, Mr. Still Waiting for That Half Chassis.

Decided after work today to do something about the sunroofs (?) sunrooves? the glass things in the roof that let the light and rain in.

Previous owner described them as



Further investigation revealed that this was, in fact, a lie.

I put the dog in the boot over the weekend and he about drowned, it just trickles in constantly via the sunroof hand cranks if it's raining and saturates the carpets/seats.



Thumbs up for farmer fixes

I think they just spooged a load of silicone into the gap between the glass and the trim without cleaning out all the gunk and moss first. Then added some caulking or some other white **** for good measure. Standard thinners were just about able to deal with most of the crap in and around the sunroofs , but the caulking stuff took most of the clearcoat with it

Long story short, I managed to scrounge a load of unwanted industrial grade PVC membrane from a new biogas plant I've been away working on for a few weeks (As well as everything else that was in the skip or otherwise not bolted down)

Ladders are for plebs so I erected a HSE compliant mobile works platform (please ignore the cherry picker parked behind)



Cut myself some rectangles, stuck them down with some good old Sikaflex EBT+ and went round the edges with that really really tough tape, the name of which escapes me.



It's not pretty, it's not permanent, but it might keep the rain out and/or the carpets dry for a while.

Ok, it's probably permanent. Does anyone do a blanking kit to do away with the damn things once and for all? Answers on a postcard.

In other news, besides the lack of a chassis section, the old girl is generating maintenance problems at a staggering rate.

In no particular order:

• The OSF axle oil seal is now leaking
• The starter solenoid needs to be rebuilt as you have to bump the key 32,584 times and offer a blood sacrifice to Denso before the starter fires
• The handbrake has reached the top of its adjustment and doesn't hold on hills
  
• The track rod has torn dust boots at both ends
• The watts linkage bushings have started knocking
• It needs a service
• It needs a coolant flush

I'm sure there's more but I've lost the will to live, goodbye.

Never give up
Never surrender

A Defender top shock mount poly bush cut carefully in half fits nicely in the watts linkage centre bush cavity. Did it on mine for a "temporary" fix for the MOT. That was about six months ago and it's still fine. Gets hammered off road so they're doing a good job.

I've just been giggling reading this thread, bird in a bin I actually lol'd
I too am in pretty much the same situation with my latest purchase, fix one problem 2 more appear.... thankfully my good lady knows zero about cars and if I said to her I need to order a LS3 crate engine for it she wouldn't know one way or another