Nuts, Screws, and Bolts

in article snipped-for-privacy@individual.net, Bob Miller at snipped-for-privacy@ntlworld.com wrote on 6/6/05 12:07 am:

I was under the impression that Landrovers ( in particular mine) was bolted together with the sweepings off the stock room floor!

4 ,Yes 4, different size nuts and bolts holding the exhaust downpipe onto the manifold requiring 8 different spanners. and about 3 different sizes holding the wings on!

I hate deep maintenence time.

Rory Manton

It's Not Pink. It's Telemagenta

And that's what it was like when it come out of the factory. Landys being landys, probably have 8 different sized bolts by now. a couple of imperial, couple of metric, and a couple of those wonderfully useless whitworth bolts.

i have not known any other brand of car, that more consistently has non standard fittings replacing the original ones, be it bolts, battery holders, seat-belts. i can't decide wether it is because A) landrover bits break quicker than most car bits B) landrover owners are very reluctant to spend the extra money on original parts C) landrover owners typically have sheds full of junk, much of which can serve any number of uses in a landrover.

Anyone got more reasons to add to the list??

Sam.

On or around Mon, 06 Jun 2005 06:51:41 +0000, Rory Manton enlightened us thusly:

can't help feeling that you've got a nonstandard one or two on the manifold joint.

as to front wings... the ones on the 110 proved to be a mixture of 1/4"UNF,

5/16"UNF, and some odd ones that go into the funny captive nuts on the door pillar.

In general, I found that 110 body parts were often UNF, the axles and suspension bits tended to be metric, propshaft bolts were UNF. V8s are (with maybe the exception of the "thor" ones, not seen one) UNF and UNC.

I don't think there are any whitworth/BSF left on the 110s, or indeed probably the later series.

Happily for us, Land Rover owners are famous for spending a tenner to save a pound. My favourite is people who replace the screws holding the lights on with a small nut & bolt and then have to try and get the unit off 3 years later.........

Richard

D) Probably the real reason - being originally designed as a stop gap with minimum tooling, the design can use a lot of off the shelf parts, including bolts and nuts. If you compare where these are used with the same place on the "ordinary" car mostly the equivalent is a special part that you can't replace with just any bolt, or it is welded up anyway so the equivalent bolt does not exist. JD

Even the last series had at least some BSF - one that comes to mind is the bolts through the drive flanges into the hub, but there are probably others. I haven't found any on my 110, but I wouldn't bet there aren't any! JD

in article snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Austin Shackles at snipped-for-privacy@ddol-las.net wrote on 6/6/05 8:37 am:

Not now I havn't, well ,standard or no they are now all the same!

Battery clamps perhaps?

On or around Mon, 06 Jun 2005 16:35:51 +0000, Rory Manton enlightened us thusly:

ah yes, some battery clamp bolts are indeed whitworth. Although I've seen metric ones in more recent examples.

I'm fairly sure there aren't any whit/BSF on the 90/110 and discos.

Have they changed the two under the axle pinion housing - used for the steering damper bracket?

On or around Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:24:15 +0100, Dougal enlightened us thusly:

never had to look at them, in fact, and I don't have a 110 any more. However, the only non-metric I found on mine anywhere were UNF, not BSF.

I may have answered my own question - there's a page "Decoding LR Fastener Part Numbers" at

that seems to haveinformation for most fastenings. So now I can go down the road to ApexFastenings, rather than driving miles to a LR parts dept. So far on myLandy I've found UNF, UNC, Metric, BSP, and BSW (the welded pads on the rearcrossmember, and we tried virtually every thread known to mankind) - I'm nottaking bets on not finding BA or even cycle thread!

The heads are the same as on 3/8" BSW bolts... 13.5mm AF if that helps!