Door Pillars

I assume you are talking about a five door station wagon - I believe the centre pillar, sill, and the sloping bit are one piece. So replacing just the sloping bit involves welding. The rest bolts or rivets together. JD

They might have been one piece once, but they aren't now :)

I can fix the sloping bit with a patch, no problem what bothers me is the bottom where the hinges go, as only one bolt is really holding the hinge, not that the door won't shut mind, unlike the front where the hinges are fine, just the the door is shaky.

Oh well does anyone recall the Africar project, you could have fixed that with carpentry.

BTW why did they never make the front bulkheads out of aluminium would have made more sence.

Never mind the rot, someone actually offered to buy it off me the other day and he could see I was busy with the fibre glass matting.

As I understand it,

a) strength (it's a major structural piece), and

b) fire resistance (all metals will burn, but steel burns much less easily than ally, so holds back any fire in the engine bay for longer). I'm not sure about C&U Regs, but I'm pretty sure that ARC regs specify a steel bulkhead for this reason.

Well strenght goes to pot when it is shot through with rust, I am sure that a suitably reinforced and scientifically designed aluminium bulkhead would outperform a steel one.

As for fire resistance, never bothered Reliant, or Marcos did it, who used GRP and Plywood respectively.

You know the firedoors you see in so many buildings? Plywood is actually pretty good at holding back a fire. With a little care on the choice of resin, so is GRP.

Maybe, but we're talking mass production here. Steel is strong and safe and easy to work. Sure, it rusts eventually, but that doesn't stop the majority of the world's cars being made of it.

Interesting that you have chosen two cars with probably among the worst safety records in the business! (Fine cars, both of them, but not exactly crash-friendly.)

I don't know the answers to your questions; I was just suggesting possible reasons.

On or around Thu, 22 Jul 2004 19:27:40 +0100 (BST), snipped-for-privacy@zhochaka.demon.co.uk ("David G. Bell") enlightened us thusly:

mind you, some fair few years ago we had a couple of old reliant body shells to dispose of, and we hauled them into the middle of the (reasonable-sized) yard and set light to 'em. It was quite difficult actually igniting it, in the end I put some paraffin-soaked paper in one footwell and lit that. for about a minute nothing much happened, then the fibreglass caught and started to burn, and within 5 minutes you literally couldn't get within 20 feet of it. Made a hellofa good fire, mind, with huge column of black smoke and everything. Probably get shot for doing that these days.

after it had burnt out to a heap of dirty glass fibre, and cooled down, sundry small alloy components such as door locks were discovered to have been converted into molten puddles.

Interesting isn't it that commercial aircraft and shipping has a much longer life than the average car.

Of course the engines, and fittings are updated from time to time, but it makes more sence.

Given the basic Landrover Chassis, you could have taken it in every five years or so for the latest upgrade. Whatever it's faults and whatever work I have got cut out, I have something that has been going for 30 years and it has not been looked after carefully, you can't say that about most motors of the same era, where have they all gone, yet there is no shortage of old landies.

Interestingly enough there are also quite a few plastic metrocabs about, they are a cross between a range rover and a plastic pig (sorry reliant), with some granada bits.

(snip)

A small number of very early Series 1 actually did have an aluminium bulkhead (hand made I believe) - they were used to keep production going when the tooling for the bulkhead was damaged, while it was being repaired.

The problem with aluminium in this application (apart from cost) is that the bulkhead has high point loads in places like the bottom of the door pillars and the door hinges that would present design problems and/or require very thick material in aluminium.

Probably a better idea - South African Landrovers built there during sanctions had galvanised bulkheads. (snip)

JD