grahamdefender90 · Jun 3, 2013

What its all about

My dad and i are going to attempt to turn our 2004 90 into a soft top. I am a 16yr old from Cape Town, South Africa.Over the next two years i want to have this car ready for when i'm finally able to drive it legally. I plan to stuff it with every off roading piece of material gadget i can afford/find. Its gonna be loud

grahamdefender90 · Jun 3, 2013

My landys from a man in George, living by the sea has played a bit of a toll on it but apart from surface rust, she's in pretty good nick.

grahamdefender90 · Jun 3, 2013

RUST. going to take some time to get this all off but she;s gonna look good once its all off. the undersides also got a nice topcoat of it but nothing a couple of wire brushes cant handle.

the_wolf · Jun 3, 2013

Call that rust?! That's nothing that is! Nice motor, looks like you got a good one

natas · Jun 3, 2013

Here is mine, before and after.

Soft top is sooo much nicer.

grahamdefender90 · Jun 3, 2013

Upon closer inspection of the car, we realised there were a couple of little issues with it, one being being we had bought pretty ****ty seats. the front to are manageable but our rear 4 weren't looking to happy.

grahamdefender90 · Jun 3, 2013

That looks beautiful, planning on doing similar to that except hoping to get a NAS front roll cage effect on it as well!

grahamdefender90 · Jun 3, 2013

whens its just you taking it off and you have the attention span of a 16 yr old, it feels like a lot!

grahamdefender90 · Jun 3, 2013

Just thought id let everyone know where im trying to go with this. I really like the SVX look, except im hoping to combine it with the slightly more tough, NAS aspect (not big fancy light surround kind of thing). have seen a couple of photos of landys with wooden decking (startech yachting edition i think..) and really want to incorporate that as well. having a bikini hood and a full canvas would be ideal, us Cape Town people have very hot summers! AM also using Plastidip to try blacken the wheels. if anyone has used it, please give some tips!

grahamdefender90 · Jun 3, 2013

So stage 1 for us was to remove the rear door. i've never worked on cars properly before but its great how simple the design of the defender is. we were able to take the door off with relative ease but it is one job for a pair of ametuers.

Disconnecting the wiring leading into the door was easy, with the collection of wires connected to the door all being able to be disconnected by a connector located behind the back-right speaker panel. we didn't really think of that though, and put ourselves through the effort of removing the entire door panel unscrewing the hand grip and disconnecting all the wires before realising that the wires wouldn't fit through the hole they would need to, so we re-screwed and reconnected everything and only then discovered the door panel!

grahamdefender90 · Jun 3, 2013

Before we started tackling the roof, we knew we were going to be taking the seats out anyway so we figured it would be more practical to take them out to give ourselves more area to work with.

Removing the lower half was tricky with many of the bolts stuck because of the rust. It would be impossible to remove the seats without to people because you need someone holding the bolt underneath while someone at the top works with the socket. the backrests were easy because once you loosen them you can just slide them out

grahamdefender90 · Jun 3, 2013

Before we started taking the roof off we had to take out the roof lights and interior. The lights were easy, all you needed is a set of screwdrivers. the panels were all relatively easily as well with most popping off nicely. for the trickier areas which wouldnt pop off, we just wedged and levered them off with a big flathead screwdriver

Boris113 · Jun 3, 2013

Tidy 90 you've got there - very little rust too!

Good choice going soft top, you won't regret it

grahamdefender90 · Jun 4, 2013

Now that we'd stripped the interior, we set about unscrewing everything holding the roof in place. This was actually relatively easy. We took off the top and the sides off together instead of doing it individually. We tried lifting it off after unfastening everything and it all came free except for some glue which held the front of the roof to the windscreen. thinking it was a mysterious set of bolts hidden somewhere behind the metal folds. we found nothing and eventually just stuck screw driver between the it and were able to un-stick it. After that, the roof came off like a charm. Car looks very sexy without a roof and am wondering if we should just leave it like this!

grahamdefender90 · Jun 7, 2013

my dad became besties with a guy he met who was driving around in an SVX while he was on his bike. My dad asked him a bit about his car and it just happens that he has a spare SVX roll cage plus and spare SVX tailgate all just lying around in his house (what are the chances, considering there are only about 10 SVX's in South Africa). To top it all off, the owner, Sean, gave it to us at an amazing discount because he was moving and wanted the stuff out of his house.
So here we have it, the roll cage (minus the front bar over the windscreen, which we're gonna have to get made) plus the tailgate

being on a pretty tight budget this is such a bonus.
SO EXCITED.

grahamdefender90 · Jul 2, 2013

sorry that havent replied in ages, laptop got stolen as my exams started so been hectic last few weeks, will be giving a flood of new developments!

grahamdefender90 · Jul 2, 2013

So the Svx hood we got has a little snag in it. it has no front part....the rear, with roof, windows and tailgate flap are all there but the front has been cut off. this is a bit of a mixed blessing. We had to go to a trimmmer to get the mohair material and for him to make something that will discretely connect to our existing material and make it all line up and fit on our roll cage, which takes time in garage (which leads to scratches and bumps on the car) and money.

The plus side though, it has given us the opportunity for us to make the hood very versatile. we got the trimmer to join the front and rear by a zip instead of stitching them together meaning we can now have a bikini option for the car as well which will suit cape towns sunny climate perfectly!

i have included a pic of our hood plus a complete svx hood which we borrowed from the man we got it from so the trimmer would be be able to replicate it. there is also a pic of the bikini part which he created with the holdfast straps on top of it.

grahamdefender90 · Jul 2, 2013

One of the issues with the hood is that it is designed to fit and SVX, which has aluminium profiles on the side to hook into. this keeps the horizontal tension and stops all that irritating flapping. we took it upon ourselves to create our own profiles, so we bought a few metres of 3mm aluminium and 6mm aluminium. the plan was rivet the 6mm on to the car first, which would provide the strength and then the 3mm on top of that so that the hooks on the hood would be able to slide under it. the 3mm was longer than the 6mm.

we didn't have any real idea of what we were doing except for on for two pics we had seen on the svx. luckily because all defenders are basically the same, there was an issue of space for the aluminium rail to fit.

we first made a prototype to see if it would work and found that the 3mm was too thick fro the plastic clip of the hood to fit under. this meant that we had to grind it down till it was just thin enough for the hood clips to fit snugly.

eventually, after much grinding, we were able to drill the holes and fit it onto the car. everything worked nicely and the next step was take it off so that we could paint it!

arc · Jul 2, 2013

Nice work there.

I like the idea of an adaptable hood full soft/bikini connected by a zip..... Am planning to do something similar for mine later in the summer. Keep the pics coming!

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