Tech Shorts 1-Mustang Sallys Bits 'n Pieces
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Steering Wheel: As everyone who drives a Series Rover knows, the wheel loses its shine after twenty years and transfers sticky black gunk to your hands in damp weather. I had two of the later Series IIA/Series III ones which were equally grey looking and had some small cracks and pits. A nice new accessory one would have been nice but no-one seems to make them in a 17 ½ inch size. Restoration was the only answer and I did it like this.
1. Remove wheel from vehicle, marking position on splines with light centre punch marks on column and boss to facilitate replacement. If it was crooked to start with, and it will be if you've replaced any of the steering rods, you may want to straighten it up when you replace it. Within reason, you can rotate it a spline or two rather than adjust length of steering drag link.
2. Rub it down, rim, spokes, boss and all with 600 grit silicon carbide wet-or-dry paper and water. Clean out any cracks with folded paper or a pointed scriber. Knock the gloss off any areas which may still be shiny. Don't get too enthusiastic as you can rub it away to nothing, especially in raised areas like the finger grips on rim.
3. When its clean and dry, fill any cracks or pits with some sort of fast setting filler. Polyester resin body filler might work but I used a metal reinforced epoxy resin in the interests of adhesion. Fill to slightly proud of the surrounding surface.
4. When filler is set get to work with abrasive paper again and flatten repair work down flush with original material.
5. When satisfied with all surfaces paint it any colour you like. I applied the same sort of spraying acrylic lacquer I used on the rest of the car but chose black. I applied a couple of coats of acrylic primer-surfacer first and sanded it back to a beautifully smooth surface when dry. Then several coats of black top coat at appropriate intervals. A couple of charges in a 250ml touch-up gun did for my wheel. Acrylic lacquer goes on somewhat dull but shines up when attacked with a straight (unwaxed) rubbing compound on a rag. If you don't have spray equipment, a couple of spraycans of touch up primer-surfacer and top coat will do the job.
6. My wheel looked just like a new one and the lacquer surface has proved to be durable with no tendency to chip or peel. I had heard of painting steering wheels and have proved to my own satisfaction that it seems to work. I'd like to add a lace on leather steering wheel glove but haven't found any large enough for a Land Rover wheel.
[back to the top]Seats: Were a tremendous problem. The vinyl covered slabs of Dunlopillo usually seen in a Series are fine if you want the full flavour of vintage Rovering but I wanted more support and comfort. A tour of wrecking yards in search of small sedan car seats produced nothing which was not sacked out, filthy, ripped or even (shudder) bloodstained for ridiculous prices. In my part of the world there is also a shortage of new accessory seats on display that you can look at and measure up. You have to be careful about buying seats for a Series as they have a high seat-box and the base squab cannot be too thick, otherwise you will never fit under the steering wheel.
Then these Australian made SAAS seats turned up on special in a local auto accessory shop. One style, one colour but they did have adjustable backrests and a pump up lumbar support bladder inside the upholstery. I was a little dubious about the high rally-style sides and the possible difficulty in getting into them but time was running out so I bought them. They have four ½ inch bolt holes in the base for attaching the support frame which cannot be too bulky. Fractions of an inch are critical when trying to fit a beefy driver under the steering wheel. I made my support frame out of flat steel bar, ¼ inch thick by 1½ inches wide. A number of ½ inch holes were drilled in the bars to permit some back and forth adjustment of the seats when fitting. In my 109 the seats can only go back so far because the filler hoses for the twin tanks are right behind the seats. If only one tank was fitted on passenger side a long legged driver would have a little more rearward space to play with. 109 Station wagons have a rear-mount tank while 88's all seem to have the fuel filler pipes behind the rear cabin bulkhead. The support frame was hinged to the front edge of the seat box and kicked up at the rear on short steel posts to make the seat base parallel to the floor of the vehicle. If the seats leaned back at the angle of the seat-box top, the thigh support bolster at the front of the base squab would move upwards a few critical fractions of an inch. My seat-box had removable alloy panels on each side under the seats for access to the tops of the fuel tanks. I replaced these alloy panels with 1/16 inch steel ones because the support frame rests on them. The bolted-on stiffeners which located the old vinyl block seats were retained for strength though the metal "horns" which supported the old fold-forward seat backs were removed by drilling out the spotwelds.
The seats do work. I can slide comfortably under the wheel and the movements for getting in and out over the high sides have become automatic. The rallycar design does give tremendous lateral support in rough going. In addition, your thighs are supported so the poor old knees don't flop sideways and clout the handbrake lever on one side or the door framing on the other. The seat back is adjustable to the most comfortable angle and the lumbar support bladder can be pumped up or deflated with a hand-held squeeze bulb which makes a difference on long road trips. Genuine Defender seats would be nice if I could get them but these seats turned out well considering how limited my choices were at the time.
[back to the top]Fusebox: I previously had a Series III four-fuse type mounted in a plastic box down on the bulkhead.That type has push on spade connectors accessible from the back of the fusebox. However, after I had a harness meltdown (see Tales of the Unexpected), I decided to mount a different type with screw-lug connections that I could get at if emergency rewiring was ever required again. Also relocated it to the new panel in front of passenger so that any troubleshooting can be done while sitting comfortably in the passengers seat. The passenger loses most of his glovebox space but he can always put his junk in the storage tray between the seats. The space behind the panel is occupied by the cables which snake off behind the original dash and there is also room for certain engine monitoring electronic boxes which are yet to be built.
The fusebox itself is a Taiwanese device which has been on sale in Australia for years under a variety of brand names. This one was sold to me in "Night Vision" packaging. Strangely, it has the words "BarDahl" moulded into the base though I cannot imagine what the firm of engine additive makers have to do with auto electrics. Perhaps the anonymous Chinese entrepreneurs who make the things decided that a name well known in car and powerboat racing would be a good one to slap onto their product.
Despite its cheapness, it's a well made moulded bakelite product with heavy wire attachment lugs and good, thick brass fuseholding clips that don't lose their spring. It has six positions for 3AG glass fuses with three common fuses on battery side and three on the switched side. The whole thing is held together with nuts, screws and common busbars so you can take it apart and reconfigure it for, say, one fuse on battery side and five on the switched side. No instructions are provided but it is easy to do.
Its only weak point is the lid which is held by a single central screw with a knurled knob on it. The screw pressure tends to break the lid. I cure this by cutting a slightly smaller piece of 1mm aluminium plate and epoxying it to the lid, then re-drilling the screw hole in the aluminium. The names of the fuses can be engraved in the alloy if you are feeling fancy or printed on an adhesive paper label and varnished for durability.
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The Console and Bulkhead extension: In the six cylinder chassis, the whole engine and transmission assembly is mounted 70mm further back than in a four cylinder. On a six cylinder bulkhead, the "bulge" between the footwells is noticeably more prominent to accomodate the rear of the engine block and the transmission bell-housing. I only had one bulkhead and that came from a pre-1967 four-cylinder Land Rover so some modifications were necessary to an otherwise fairly good item.
The "bulge" as fitted to the six-cylinder is a slightly sloping steel pressing. However, I elected to manufacture my bulkhead extension as a simple vertical box welded up from 3/32 zinc-coated steel. It is 70 mm, or 2 3/4" deeper than the four cylinder pressing which was removed by drilling out the spotwelds. .
The sides of the box extend forward a few inches and are bent to the same angle as the footwell sides which overlap these box extensions. A number of nuts and bolts pulled footwell sides and new metal together, then the original spot weld holes were used to puddle-weld the job using a MIG unit.
I never intended to have a middle passenger seat so I decided to make a flat-topped console over the transmission at the same height as the seat-box . It looks good in my opinion and there is plenty of room on the inside of the panels to fit thick soundproofing material. In fact, the angular bulkhead bulge and console look like something Solihull might have invented.
Here are some drawings explaining a little more about the design of the console.
The 4WD plunger rod needed to be a little longer than normal but it was simple to lengthen the rod with a short sleeve of 5/16 steel fuel pipe. The transfer lever slot was dressed up with a simple surround made of aluminium. A strip of soft rubber with a slit cut in it is sandwiched 'twixt surround and console top.The lever travels in the slit and the rubber keeps hot air, oil fumes and road spray from percolating through the slot.
The console sides are very simple bits of alloy sheet with flanges bent top and bottom in a Workmate type vice. The bottom flanges are bolted through the aluminium floor boards to custom made nut-plates epoxied to the underside of the sheet. The inner edges of the floor boards formerly extended to meet the narrower stock transmission tunnel but now they are trimmed to suit the width of this console assembly.
