hi, as things go, i'm fairly high up the computer geek scale, a programmer by trade. but i have just bought my first defender so that is giving me all sorts of mechanical tendencies also. i've found various bits and pieces on the net detailing the different jobs people have done on their vehicles, but i haven't yet found a really great community-driven web site with articles, step by step guides etc on all the weird and wonderful things that people do to their land rovers.
my idea today while i was fitting side runners (and running into a problem) was that it would be great if there was a wiki, that might have (among many other things) an in-depth guide to the task i was doing. the instructions that came with the pack had about 5 sentences that took plenty of head-scratching to figure out, and they were very poorly illustrated. i know it's a really basic job, but i'm only learning... for instance, the holes didn't match up between the small side support bracket and the chassis, because that part of my chassis has a small dent, and i think the bracket is too long anyway. so i tried drilling a new hole in the bracket, but i never drilled metal before and didn't have the right drill bits... there could be another article on how to drill holes in your defender, sealing the treads, etc. you get the idea!
it's probably just me being a total beginner, but it could become a really valuable knowledge base, with expertise that even the experts would draw on, because nobody knows everything, right?. the best place online i've found is this newsgroup, but newsgroups only show threads of conversations, and they are obviously very limited compared to a wiki where everyone can contribute and improve the quality of articles, and add new ones as they please.
as an example, with this job i'm working on with the side runners, i could write an article on fitting side-runners, and take pictures along the way, documenting the pitfalls i ran into, and it might save the next guy who encounters the same problems.
any thoughts? is there such a wiki already? i have a fast web server with plenty of bandwidth and all that jazz, so i could easily set the whole thing up to run MediaWiki (the same software that runs WikiPedia). appreciate any comments.
tim.