It’s been a bit quiet in here. Soz. Turns out writing blog content takes a really, really long time – and I’ve been pretty busy. We were supposed to be heading off for a 3-month roadtrip to southern Europe and the Balkans, err, yesterday. Between getting the DAF ready for that, and sorting various other […]
Fixing/maintaining stuff
Andy’s landy bandies
First things first. ‘Deep dish’ or low-offset rims look awesome. Fact* *By ‘fact’ I of course mean ‘opinion’, but hey, this is the internet – let’s not split hairs. Alas, original-style rims with a tasty offset were used only on a select few models. This makes them rare and expensive. So where does that leave me? Well, I’ve […]
Series 1 seatbox repair
The crustfest continues. Today, it’s the turn of the seatbox. Well, I say today, this took pretty much an entire weekend. At a glance, it didn’t look too bad when I took it off. A bit saggy maybe but hey, it’s over 60 years old. If I’d had someone sitting on me on and off for […]
Crusty bottom
A typical land rover rebuild requires a fair bit of rust busting. I think we’ve established that. It’s not just the steel bits that rot though. While the aluminium panels (particularly the Birmabright on earlier vehicles) are more corrosion resistant than steel, they do corrode. This usually occurs where they are in contact with steel parts […]
The shame. The unbearable shame.
It’s about 10 years now that I’ve been mooching around in elderly land rovers. That was (past tense) 10 years in which I’ve never had a breakdown that’s stopped me from getting on my way. I’ve never had any major issues, and anything that has gone wrong I’ve always been able to fix en-route. I put […]
Series battery box replacement
One of these days I’ll write about something that isn’t rust-related. Today is not that day. The subject of todays rust-busting is the 109’s under seat battery box. On earlier models these were tool trays, and were aluminium (the battery was mounted in the engine bay). On later models, the batteries moved to under the passenger seat. […]
Second row door repair – part deux
After spending many, many hours rebuilding the left hand second row door on the 109″ station wagon (see here), I had a few ideas for how to improve the process for the other door. Firstly, taking all the measurements then building the frame back up ‘freehand’ was an enormous pain in the proverbial ass, and took […]
Station wagon rear door repair
Seeing as I’ve already done a lengthy post on repairing doors here, and it’s probably not the most interesting of topics, I’ll keep this short. Well, I’ll try at least… The construction of the rear door is the same as the second row doors – aluminium skin and steel frame. The rear door brings an […]
Brake line replacement
One of the rear axle brake lines on the 127 was looking a shade… (drum roll)… rusty. Wow. It’s almost like that’s some sort of a running theme. Thankfully brake line replacement is a fairly quick job to do – the rear axle lines in particular are easily accessible and not very long or complex. You can […]
Discovery 3.9 EFI fuel line replacement
A friend put his Discovery 1 in for it’s MOT recently. All was going swimmingly (relatively, for a 20-year old Disco) until one of the fuel lines sprung a leak whilst it was up on the ramp. That’ll be a fail, then. Once I’d stopped laughing (but not before I’d stopped slagging him off about it) […]