Peter: Mostly Harmless

Quick note in the middle of the “story so far” – I dropped the tailgate off at the Paint Shop today and they are hoping to have it finished within a couple of days ready for collection at the end of the week. Although the rest of the bodywork is nowhere near ready, I decided to get the tailgate done in advance so I can make sure I like the paint scheme I’ve gone for – it would be a very expensive change if I had the entire body done and then decided I didn’t like it!

I’ll fill in the details of how I got the tailgate ready later on, but for now I’ll get back to the correct place in the timeline and pick up where I left off with the last post.

Yet again MANY weeks have gone past and despite promising (myself really, lets be honest) many times, I just haven’t got of my arse and written up where I’m up to.

Actually, between Ethan's 3rd birthday, business suddenly getting crazily busy (not going to complain given the economy at the moment) and about 200 other flimsy excuses I just haven’t had the time to write up.

In the last post I was planning to get out and start breaking the donor down, and for once I was actually able to do exactly that on the Sunday. 3 or 4 hours work saw pretty much the entire of the rear interior removed. The main rear seats came out really easily (4 bolts) and the carpet was quite easily removed once I removed the plastic trim that holds it down at the back.

The hardest thing by a long way was removing the 2 ‘dickie’ seats right at the back as the brackets are held on by torx bolts that are tucked right in against the side panel of the car making it damn near impossible to undo them with a normal L shaped torx key (like an allen key, but splined instead of hex).

The first one saw me cursing for about 45 minutes before I finally got it out. For the second one I just decided to rip out the hardboard panels behind it and this gives loads of space to get the torx key in.  I also had a problem with the seatbelt mounts for the main back seats because they were just so damn stiff to undo. In the end I bought a set of 1/4’’ Torx sockets from Machine Mart and did it with a standard socket wrench and then used the air compressor wrench to finish it off – much much quicker. Since then I’ve found dozens of other bolts that needed different size Torx keys so I’m really glad I bought that set.

In retrospect, if you’re building a Sahara of your own and the rear dickie seats aren’t worth saving to sell on then i’m pretty sure you could just leave them bolted to the body work as it will go when you remove the bodyshell anyway and there is nothing behind them that you need to save.

By the end of the afternoon I had it all removed and piled up on the floor, but I did leave the 2 upper panels on either side as these are part of holding the headlining up.  Everything that was salvageable/sell-able (seats, seatbelts, parcel shelf etc.) I moved into the garage, and I loaded the remaining bits into the now very empty back and took round to the local tip and sorted into the appropriate recycling bins etc. It was really cool taking it out for this quick trip because with all the rear sound deadening and carpets etc. removed I could hear that fabulous v8 engine note much more clearly and it gave me a good idea of what I might hear when the car is finished (whenever that will be!)

Wherever possible I’ve decided to try and reuse all the bits I can, those that I have no use for I’m hoping to sell/give away so they can be used elsewhere and anything left over will hopefully be recyclable – it would be nice to have as little as possible going to landfill.

That was pretty much it for that day and it was a week or two before I got another chance to get out there.

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The next time I got a chance to do some work on the donor I was a lot less timid and used a bit more brute force and ignorance. Ethan (just under 3 years old at the time) was also helping me this time and he had a great time “spannering” – and I really enjoyed having him involved so I’m looking forward to doing more with him whenever I can.

We stripped down the entire of the rear door and reclaimed all the internal parts, wiring, motors and lock mechanism. I was hoping to salvage the spare wheel mount, but when I went to take it off the bottom corners just fell straight off as they had entirely rusted away. I’ve since bought a replacement second hand from ebay for a tenner so no big loss!

We also stripped out the last side panels and then removed the headlining that I’d left last time. This exposed the main wiring harness that runs from the passenger footwell, up the A pillar and along the roof line before dropping down both rear corners to the lights and under the floor to the fuel tank (for the pump/level sender etc.)

It also revealed a secondary harness that goes up the drivers side A pillar which is for the electric sunroofs.

At this point we just dropped the harnesses down onto the floor but didn’t disconnect anything because I wanted to keep the car drivable, and if we disconnected the main harness then the lights would stop working, and far more importantly the fuel pump – and it’s quite hard to run an engine without any fuel being pumped to the engine!

We did remove the wiring sub-harness from the back door as the only thing that this affects is the rear wiper, rear demisters and the license plate light – incidentally it’s a legal requirement to have this light working, so at this point the car was no longer road legal, so keep that in mind.

Again, I sorted all the bits out and kept as much as possible and the remainder is already being split up going to several people who want various bits – for instance, I don’t have a rear window in the final car, so no use for the rear wiper motor/arm etc!

That wrapped it up for another day and I made plans with Liam for a big ‘chopping’ (as Ethan called it!) day a week or so later to get the final bits ready for taking the body shell off.

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A couple of days before the big day, I managed to grab a few hours work one afternoon and took off the 2 (utterly knackered) side steps – though these were a total nightmare because the previous owner had clearly smashed them into the ground off-roading or a kerb or something as they were both bent right over so I had to use a pry-bar to bend the brackets back. In practice, the bolts all pulled straight through the brackets as they were very rusty, and at one point the damn thing slipped and smashed into by thumb leaving a great black bruise under the thumbnail and even now (2 or 3 months later) it’s still visible and will be for another month or so until the nail grows out!

I also removed the 2 rear upper light clusters and the fuel tank sender connections so I could then spool up the main rear harness onto the passenger seat. at this point the car was no longer driveable as the pump now can’t operate, and from a legal viewpoint there is no rear lighting!

I also disconnected all the wiring from the 2 sunroofs and reclaimed all the switchgear and the sunroof ECU and stored all this pending selling it on as used but working parts.

I then removed the entire ‘face’ of the car by removing the grill, the front bumper and valance and also the headlights, sidelights and fog lights. In the picture below, the water pissing out of a hose pipe is actually from the windscreen washer tank as this model had jets that also cleaned the headlights and the moment I dropped the bumper off the hose snapped and unleashed the blue torrent!

I spent a bit of time disconnecting and re-routing the various pipes and cables from the inside edges of the engine bay getting ready for the big chop.

The last thing I did was to remove the 2 remaining seats (drivers and passenger) and the front carpets and that left the bodyshell entirely empty.

In the space of a couple of hours the car went from pretty normal looking to fairly trashed as it now had no external lights and most of the front end removed!

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The big day was upon us and by the time liam arrived I had all the tools out of the garage ready and had started undoing bolts ready.

First off was the bonnet as it’s only held on with 4 bolts and it meant we then had access to the entire engine bay. Next off we removed the 4 doors and the tailgate and reclaimed all the wiring connectors. Unfortunately no-one was interested in the doors so these went onto a pile ready for the scrap man to collect the next afternoon.

Suddenly I realised that we had reached the literal point of no return – up until now I could theoretically have put all the bits back on and sold it on as a working vehicle, but the time had come to remove some pretty major parts of the structure and then there would no going back.

The time had come to remove the entire front of the car back to about 6 inches infront of the A pillar and main bulkhead. Viewed from above this is a ‘C’ shape that wraps around the front of the car and holds a large amount of the ancillaries in the engine bay such as the battery, ABS system, fusebox, cruise control pump – though it took me an hour of Googling to find what the hell it was! It obviously also used to hold the front grill and headlights etc.

We marked up the line we wanted to chop down based on pictures from the Sahara build manual and very gingerly starting to cut. Apart from effectively a couple of test cuts this was actually the first time I had ever used an angle cutter (as opposed to a grinder which is a thicker disc) and I’m not sure I could have been any more nervous.  After a little while though I got my confidence and made short work of the first cut. We carried out the same cut on the other side, then along the inside edge of the engine bay leaving the ‘top’ of the wheel arches intact as these carry the ABS modulator and some other sundries and at this point I didn’t know where I would relocate these to if I removed the arch entirely. To be honest touching the brake system scares the crap out of me so if I can avoid doing anything with it at all I’ll be a happy man.

I had already unbolted the main radiator from the front panel and also the automatic gearbox oil cooler (more on that problem later!) so we just had to undo the 2 bolts at the front and the front C section just lifted straight off and onto the pile for the scrapman.

By this point we had used up 2 of the cutting discs and we only had another 4, but we still had a massive amount of cutting to do to free the bodyshell from the chassis.

The full details are very boring but it basically consists of slicing through the A' pillars just above the dashboard, then cutting a line all the way along the inside edge of the body shell (round about where your foot would rest if you sat in the car with the edge of your shoe against the door). This line goes back to just behind the rear door, then inwards towards where the floor rises up underneath the rear seats to form the boot floor. You then cut directly across the boot floor and come back up the other side.

The biggest problem we had was actually at the foot of the A pillar where you have to cut in from the outside edge. This cut has to go completely through a large 3x2” piece of box section that forms the main sill of the car. Our grinder only uses small cutting discs so we couldn’t do it on one cut, but equally we couldn’t actually get up and under the from underneath to cut by working our way around the edge of the section. Liam had a brainwave and basically cut a 3 inch wide slice out of the outer edge of the box section and we could then easily get the cutter in to cut through from the ‘inside’ of the box to the inside edge. You can see this cut in the second picture below – the light coloured section of sill just behind the A pillar.

At this point we ran out of cutting discs, but we also ran out of time so we called it a day. I arranged for the scrapman to come and get the pile of bits the next day to avoid the garden looking like we had turned into hobo’s or something and went to wash up – and that took a while as it turns out that when using a cutting disc, most of the bits of metal that fly off land in your hair.

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The scrapman was booked to come on the monday lunchtime and bring his lorry with the crane arm and the plan was to have him just lift the body straight off the chassis. Over the weekend I went to B&Q and bought another load of cutting discs so I could finish off the few last bits ready for him. I also unbolted the rear bumper (well, sheared off all the bolts trying to – and they are bloody thick, so my arms were aching that evening) and undid the 4 other chassis bolts to free the body from the chassis.

Before he arrived I used a trolley jack to lift up the sill to check it was all free, but the damn thing wouldn’t lift off at all, in fact the entire chassis was lifting up so clearly it was still attached somewhere. It turned out that I hadn’t quite cut through enough where the front seatbelts bolt onto the chassis. They sit inside a little cage and although I had cut through the cage, I hadn’t cut deep enough to slice through the actual floor. A quick cut with the angle grinder and the body was free.

An hour or so later Rowley (the village scrapman) came round and lifted off the body with ease. Well, I say what, the first attempt went badly wrong and actually scratched the glove compartment and understeering wheel panel so heavily that i’ve had to buy another pair from ebay for a (yes another) tenner. This wasn’t his fault at all, and I would recommend that if you do it this way that you actually chop out the entire sill all the way from the A to the B pillar as it will only take 2 minutes to do and would make levering the body off much easier.

After he had gone I then did some additional cutting to the A pillars to remove the door pillars and also realised that in the later pictures in the build manual it shows that you need to cut closer to the bulkhead (where we earlier removed the big C shaped section) so i took another inch or so off that bit. Worth noting if you are building one of these yourself that there is more to take off than you see in the first pictures in the build manual!

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Next time – Nick from NCF delivers the new Saraha bodywork!

Well it’s been a few weeks and there have some pretty good things happen since last time.

The main one being my birthday – and Ellie bought me a whole host of top notch tools ready to get started on the car!  I’m now the proud owner of an Impact wrench, angle grinder, Dremel multi-tool and most of all……a superb air compressor to drive air powered tools!  Doesn’t get much more manly that that !!!

The next cool thing was that this morning (well, this evening after I got home from work actually) I got a letter from Nick who’s the chap building the main kit car body with some pictures of the body mocked up showing the modifications – and it looks absolutely brilliant so really pleased with that. I’m going to give him a call tomorrow to confirm and that (hopefully!) will be the end of me messing him about and he can get it all finished and delivered :)

With that in mind, the next step is for me start stripping the donor car down and that should hopefully be Sunday as Ellie is taking the kids to a birthday party and therefore I’ve got a few hours off.  First thing to do is to remove the passenger seatbelt and also one of the rear passenger seatbelts as I need to get these to Nick so he can finalise the position of the seatbelt mounts on the rollcage.

Up until this afternoon I was still hesitant about starting to break the donor down as I was enjoying driving it around from time to time, but today I realised that in practice I was just driving round in a car with a slightly shabby interior and not the most comfortable seats in the world – as opposed to my usual car which is fantastic by comparison! So I’m now more than happy to get the stripping underway.

I spent a bit of time checking on ebay recently to see what bits I won’t be keeping could sell and bring me a bit of money. Sadly most of the parts – including entire doors and even the carpets and headlining would only raise about £4.50 in total so that plans gone and I’ll sadly just be binning all the leftovers. The only exception is the switch that controls the passenger electric seat – remarkably this is worth £45 for some reason!

Right, hopefully I’ll report back with more info in the next couple of days as things get underway……very very excited!

I had some good news yesterday – the Discovery passed it’s MOT test and is now fully road legal.  It needed a couple of new brake pipes and a new brake servo but other that than it was all pretty straight forward.

This morning I therefore drove it to the Post Office and got myself a nice shiny new Tax disc for the princely sum of AAAAHHHH £s. Yes it was little pricey, but it turns out a 4 litre V8 isn’t in the cheapest tax band!

A lot of people will be wondering why I bothered getting it tested and back on the road if I’m only going to start taking it apart in the near future in preparation for the new bodywork arriving.

The answer is twofold.

Firstly: I now know that the basic vehicle is mechanically safe and road legal (as far as an MOT covers). There’s not much point spending the next 6 months building it only to find out at the end that the chassis/axles etc. should have been set alight and floated out to sea on a Viking burial longboat

Secondly: I can spend the next 2 or 3 weeks using it as an occasional drive :) I’d love to give a good reason like ‘to give it a good run to see if there is anything I need to attend to’ or some other good excuse, but really its just that I want to have a good play in my new toy before I need to really get to work gutting it ready for the new rollcage and body.

And the expensive tax disc that will gather dust for 6 months or however long it takes to get the finished project on the road? Easy – you can send them back and get a refund on the months you haven’t used.  Therefore I’ll keep the disc until towards the end of September and then send it back for a refund.

Watch this space for some pics of the new toy and hopefully some news of the delivery of the first set of bits!

A: They are all CD’s I found today inside the CD multi-changer that I didn’t even know was under the drivers seat the Discovery I bought last week!

The previous owner had removed the original Land Rover stereo and replaced it with a much nicer modern Radio/CD Player so it never even crossed my mind to see if there was a multi-changer in the car, but during my lunch break today I was trying to work out why the drivers seat doesn’t go up and down and while looking underneath suddenly realised that there it was, staring me in the face.

Because the original radio had been removed, it wouldn’t eject the cartridge so I wondered into the office to grab a screwdriver and socket set to remove the whole unit.

Obviously because nothing is ever easy (particularly on a Land Rover) it didn’t come straight out.  Normally it’s a really easy job as you just slide the seat to reveal the bolts and then you can whip it out.

Did I mention the seat is stuck and can’t be moved?

Therefore I had to go with either a) removing it with tools properly or b) removing it with a big hammer (also technically a tool, but not really the right spirit!)

I started by removing those little plastic push-fit lugs that were holding on the trim around the bottom of the seat so I could get at the bolts. Naturally this didn’t want to come off because it was tucked under the carpet at the edges.

The carpet won’t come up because it in turn is held on with a 3 foot bit of trim under the edge of the drivers door.

So the removal therefore went:

1. Remove the plastic lugs – astonishingly enough not a single one broke/split/pinged off hitting me in the eye
2. Remove the trim at the bottom of the door sill (4 very rusty screws)
3. Remove the trim around the drivers seat – after finding the hidden rusty screw, Hidden underneath a sticky substance I don’t even want to consider.
4. Bugger about for 10 minutes removing all the skin off my fingers undoing the 3 bolts that hold the cd player down. This nearly resulted in giving up and heading for Hammer Option B
5. Refit the various trims.
6. Carry exceedingly dirty cd changed into the office
7. Wash hands. A lot.

It then took me nearly as long again to get the damn case of the CD changer to get at the CD’s, but due to pig ignorance/brute force I got them out. The CD changer (well, the 4 or 5 large bits left) when headed for the bin.

Based on the CD’s found I can only conclude the previous owner was likely around 40 (due to the very high number of Clapton CD’s in it), bought Thriller Special Edition because it reminded him of when he was young and had the original LP (yes, I know I have the LP too, but thats not my point!) and was having a mid life crisis and decided that buying a single Zutons album would remove 20 years from his appearance.

On the plus side, I’m now up 6 albums and theres enough space to look under the damn seat to start working out why the seat won’t move :)

More to follow….