The S3 Beach Bus, and so it begins......

excellent thread, didn't realise amberley did a classic land rover day. haven't been there for about 15 years will try to remember to look in on 14th oct this year

Likewise, its not too far from me and I've just looked up the date too. Do you know if we have to register in advance?

couldn't see anything on the website about registering, might be too soon for them to be organised

http://www.amberleymuseum.co.uk/october

We just turned up, said we have a Series Land Rover and they let us in. You still have to pay though ;-).

Fair enough, we're always on the scrounge...

I did a youtube video of the door top replacement/rebuild which I thought may be of interest to people.

The video can be found here.


The next task is to finish off tidying up the rear tub and then actually attack the wiring. I know I've been threatening to do it for a while but it has been a case of "if it's working, don't fix it", plus it's winter, resulting in limited enthusiasm for poking things with a multimeter.

Hopefully we will get to do some Tyro events in the next few months. I have been giving my eldest, 14, some basic driving lessons as he is up for having a go.

I cheated when I did mine I bought fully glazed tops from famous four. iirc the only thing they didn't have was the window lock which was easy to transfer. much better primed than the paddocks ones seem to be.

came with new nuts off with the old and on with the new, job done

I would have gone over the primer anyway so I wasn't too concerned. Other than the original primer being patchy in a few places the door tops were quite good. I had read about other people finding theirs didn't fit properly but these are just right.

Oh Feck, the heater appears to have expired. I would like to have it working but I really don't fancy going outside to work on it this evening. The normal car says -3 deg C.
Am I going soft?

Is it the blower that's not working?

Don't blame you not working on it in these temps. I'm sure it can wait a week or two until a sunny spring day appears.

Got it going quite quickly. It was an issue with the switch.

Then we went out for a bit of a play, as did a lot of other Land Rovers around here.

This was taken about 20 metres to the right of the sunny one in my avatar.

Here is a rough video I threw together of taking the truck out in the snow . All the in car video was shot by my 12 year old using his phone.

Nice vid!

Great thread and very inspiring.

Enjoyed the vid, great!

So, I haven't posted for a while. Work has been a bit hectic and I've been using the Land Rover plus a bit of tinkering.

I now have two Differential housings that are not dripping any oil! Next challenge is the leak(s) from the engine.

I have been experimenting with a 24v to 12v converter rated at 10 amps to see how this goes with a 12v wiper motor. It seems to work fine at present. I intend to have a common 12v bus for the future so if a 24v unit fails I can replace it with a considerably cheaper standard 12v one.

I had the dim dip fail so I only had main beam on. The copper contacts seem to have arced to the point where there is no contact. Cleaning them up with a pad file has pushed the contacts apart. I have made a jumper switch up but will have to replace the unit. I'm not sure how long the replacement will last as it looks prone to this sort of thing.

Here are a couple of pictures from yesterday where those of us at work with interesting cars took them into work to raise money for Alzheimers research by giving rides during lunch for a donation. I had a go in a Noble for a fiver. It was fairly mental.

Right, having spent most of the summer charging around with the canvas rolled up/removed and neglecting the beast other than to feed her oil & petrol, I decided that I didn't fancy getting my feet wet during the winter rain. I therefore have been attacking the scuttle vent seals.

I replaced these fairly soon after getting the vehicle as they were old and had been spray painted so were fairly hard. In the rain water would run down the centre of the bulkhead from behind the dash and also run down into the footwells. Replacing the seals got rid of the central leak but not the footwells. Still it was an improvement of sorts. However I decided that I'd had enough. Looking at the vent flaps they were not sitting flat on the seals at the outer ends so after a bit of forum surfing I decided to remove the seals which I had stuck in with superglue. I used superglue for quickness but decided I should use silicon sealant in case this was adding to the leak due to an incomplete glue line.

On the vent flaps it had been recommended that weather sealing strip is added to the side and bottom edges of the flaps. I did this and I now have a dry driver's footwell. The passenger side has worked as well for the vents but when testing with a hosepipe there is a slight leak from the heater matrix to bulkhead gasket area where the engine bay bulkhead gutter drains down onto this area. Under normal rain it is dry, the hosepipe flow rate is probably a bit excessive! It's also dry if you park drivers side up on the kerb as the water misses the holes then.

Anyway this has now got me considering replacing the two footwells. I've known I'll have to do it sometime but this is making me seriously consider how I'm going to do it now. The rest of the bulkhead seems good so it would be a shame to let these areas fester and trash the rest of it. I think I'll start with penetrating oil on all the bolts and them gradually make sure everything unbolts smoothly before going for it.

Another area on the hit list is the shimming of the top swivel mounts as although I have stopped the steering relay moving, significantly improving the steering, there is still a bit more wander in the steering than I would like. More surfing suggest this is the next area to investigate.

Now do I do it all over winter ready for summer, or do I wait to see if we get snow to play in ?

We took advantage of the nice weather over the week end and had one of the last late nights down West Wittering beach before they shut every night at 6.30 over the winter. I got the LED courtesy light set up in the rear which makes things a bit more civilised. I just need to tidy up the wiring & get some plug in connectors for when I want to remove the tilt frame in summer.
I even got Mars in the bottom picture, though I didn't notice that until just now.

Looks wonderful, well done for getting your timing right; we looked an the weather and set of to Portsmouth last Tuesday with a forecast of 5% chance of rain and it never stopped! It did provide the first real test of our new thermostat controlled heater, but i was hoping not to need it, and being the first use in anger i spent far too much time watching it to check it came on.

I admit I did have several go's at it.