As an ex royal signals bod the ffr has long been a love of mine, having got one and being a few years wiser my landy fun was a journey down memory lane and also an introduction to disapointment, as a young man you believe that everything thd mod gets made is the best of the best, well today as a senior design engineer even giving credit for construction year and design state of the art , I can only say to the designers of the landrover, reasonable mechanical design, very very poor electrical design. I have spent the last few months retrofitting my 110 defender. I just can not believe the very poor manufacture of the cable harness, the lucas colour coding was a wonderfull thing why did thay screw it up with such a disgusting cable mess? Everything you touch in the cabyou find single wires too short to allow removal of units like the fuse box relay box indicator switches and lighting switches, next point the galvanicks did they realy not know better? then you look at the mod instalations, my first shock was getting home with the ht cable burning because the ffr filter capacitor on the 12v alternator fell off so shorting the battery to the chassis and no fuse later and lots of smoke I was minus the whole heavy guage cable from the alternator to the starter motor pluss some sensors like oil and the diesel injector cut off, investigating the error I was yo find about the worst bit of design of a bracket to hold the capacitori have ever seen, a coke can probably uses thicker metal! This was my first dissapointment that crashed my dreams and memories, a few weeks later and a sepperate run of this vital cable also in a flexible conduet and we were back on the road. The next shock was the cab heating or rather the lack of it, I think the surface area of the radiator is more sized up to heating a hamster cage than a military vehichle and here I am looking only at the capability to defrost and demist the windscreen . I hope the calculation was done to reduce the thermal footprint that heat seeking weapons would see because its deffinetly not calculated to stop the driver freezing to death , on the north yorkshire moors in winter. So here my mod which may Iinterest you guys as a profeshional engineer, I use quite allot of industrial phneumatics, you can get off the role, 6mm od 4mm id teflon tube which takes over 10 bars of preshure at 220 degrees C well my design looks like this. In the drivers cab and the rear fit 15mm strofoam sheet and 15mm plywood varnished, as new flooring, now using a hand miller wood cutter mill out of the wood a 4mm deep 6mm wide channel for underfloor heating pipes , fix them to the board with duct tape, if you need to cross mill out the cross position deeper 10mm. Ok fit your new flooring and fiddle in the pipes, using phneumatic fittings bring all pipes together and fit a single butterfly valve, or ball valve and hard solder it and the return to copper pipes standard 15mm yorkshire ! Get the pipes into the engine room and using t pieces fit to the 2 pipes to the hampster cage radiator with the dare I say blower? And bingo you have real heating, in the arctic heating option lots of space between seats was wasted for less effectivity ! I have a number of mobile laboratory containers here I had a wizo idea! The labs are solar powered till yours truly getts to twiddle the knobs and wants warmth as well as extra power for tools and test equipment, well I have played with the idea of buying a block power heating unit, why when you have a landy? I get from the ffr 24v generator 90 amps, thats enough to charge the solar batteries and extra load, I have in the containers a 24 to 230v inverter and on the side of the landy 100A connectors, by the way my battery has been also retrofitted with a battery 1000A fuse, now in the containers I have fitted normal house radiators an automatic air bleeder and an expanshion tank. The radiators go to flexible hoses with hydraulic no drip connectors that are insulated with armourflex. On the side I have again 2 hydraulic fittings bolted to a recess plate , here again connection to the pipes of the hampster cage radiator blower assy. If I am stationary I pull the hand throttle for the genny and turn off the hampster heater using the organ stops. As the vehicle is physicaly connected to a stationary building its also legal to burn heating oil. An extra valve to suck up from a jerry can is not yet fitted! This sommers play time.. my retrofitting spree has been allot of fun I have found the 110 defender way off perfect but it has sporned me on to correcting one hell of allot of shoddy workmanship as well as having to invent new technology which I hope may interest some of you enough to copy, the underfloor heating is definetly worth it , fitting carpet from the role saved enough money to allow this in the first place

Next bitch, the dexion for fitting clansman radio kit, ever noticed that the u sections of dexion point like knives at the drivers and passengers skulls, I wonder how many accidents ended up with serious brain damage in accidents due to this ministry of stupidity cock up I just could not belive that when I was Iin uniform I was subjected to such a danger! I have replaced it compleatly with a plywood sheet with a large square porthole in the middle.

Another mod, by fitting another tube simply stuck into the air input manifold feed pipe! Rubber! its possible to meashure the vacuum experienced by the motor using the simple logic the higher the vacuum the more dificulty the landy has to breath and with it the higher the fuel bill its easy to see bad driving as well as blocked filters ee.t.c. come on this mod is easy!!!!

I adjusted my heater box and flushed my matrix and fitted a new stat and my heating is such that it's to hot sometimes, I genuinely have to turn it off