On Saturday I decided to fit a set of JATE rings to my V8 skip. No problem you may think!
I ended up under the car with two ratchets going to remove the original bolts and of course one of them slipped.
I now have a chip in one of my front teeth that wasn't there before. Moral of this tale is "don't stick your head directly below where you're working"
I also managed to accidentally back the handbrake adjuster off all the way. That was interesting, especially as I couldn't get the alignment on the drum to move it up again (I was rolling the car back and forth and trying to do it that way). Phoned around the area and discovered that *all* the brake places in the area (Aylesbury Vale for reference) are crap. Without exception. A lot of them denied point blank that handbrakes could be adjusted. Most of the rest just refused to do RangeRovers. 2 suggested I go to the dealer. Sure - I'm going to pay £82 per hour to have my brakes adjusted. One offered to look at it and offered a free stripdown and inspection. I think the poor dear thought I didn't know what I was talking about and assumed a rear pad acting handbrake which is what? 5-10 minutes to strip and rebuild? He took one look at what he'd taken on and ran screaming. Needless to say it didn't get done that day.
Strip the air filter out and pull one of the flexis off the manifold that leads to the heater matrix, shove a hosepipe in and turn on the hose. Turns out the reason the heater hadn't been working was that there was nothing but air in there despite the rest of the system being OK. That's fixed now.
Eventually rain and wind stopped my inclination to play any further.
Sunday I go at it again. Having talked with my dad and getting exclamations of "The Series motors I served my time on had a square peg adjuster on the handbrake - you mean the Rangerover's gone back in time?" I come up with a new way to do the handbrake.
First you lash the towball on the back of the rangie to the towing eye on your other car. You then move the other car off slowly and take up the slack on the rope and then park it with the handbrake on. You now have your RangeRover anchored.
Now you stick a jack under one side or other of the rear axle and lift one wheel around 1/4" off the ground - far enough that it will move, not high enough to bounce if the jack drops.
You can now twiddle the driveshaft at will by hand and all that will happen is one wheel will spin.
Now discover that the Haynes Book of Lies has the direction of the adjuster wrong and moving it down does in fact back off the setting and moving it up brings it in. Adjust the handbrake, drop the jack, be happy.
I now get daring. I decide to replace the rear bumpstops.
Mistake.
The nearside one came off with little more persuasion than some WD40 and a pencil blowtorch. The nuts were a bit stiff, but they came off. the new bumpstop went on and job's a goodun.
The offsite one was somewhat more tricky. In fact the remains of it are still there because of two little problems. The bolt head on the front bolt has rounded so there's no way to lock it up while turning the nut. The nut on the rear bolt has become perfectly circular so there's no hope of getting that off intact either. Tomorrow I pay both of them a visit with a power drill and see if that will move the buggers.
Greasing the nipples on the propshafts was stupidly easy. I'm still waiting to see what went wrong there - three on each shaft, right? And just grease until the grease you're putting in starts coming back out through other places.
On a whim I checked the front swivel housings. I undid the bungs and saw the metaphorical tumbleweed. Dry as a bone, so out to Halfrauds to get some EP90. Except they don't have EP90. They have EP80 or SAE75/80.
Off to the local accessories place who do have EP90 but only by the gallon. Buy a oil filler jug too.
Get home and discover that the swivel housings will take 2 pints of EP90 each. Not a good thing.
Fortunately the diff housings had oil enough, as did the engine (What's happening? My V8 has stopped burning oil as if it's petrol!)
I then get a little carried away.
Skippy doesn't have a cigar lighter. It sacrificed its space for a replacement horn control (the one on the stalk died and it was easier just to rewire the whole lot, especially as they need to be relay fed, what with the original HiLos and the three horn airhorn rig - I'm considering fitting a second three horn rig I found in the garage but the local kids have already given up trying to annoy me with the horn on their little Honda bikes). Skippy now has three auxilliary sockets on the dash in addition to the banana jacks on the steering column. This is one of the threeway adapters Halfrauds sell which has had the current limiter circuit forcibly removed so that it can actually drive my compressor and floodlight.
Fitting this naturally involved dropping out the entire dashboard, but I needed to do this anyway as the hose to the extreme right hand demister vent had worked loose and was floating around being no use to anyone.
All fixed now.
My project for this week is now to drill off the old bump stop and rig a small 12V fan on the roof in the rear pointing towards the back window and wired into the RSD circuit as the RSD built into the window has parted company with its terminals and I can't be bothered trying to fix it.
And I probably need to fit a set of rear shocks. The ones on the front are new enough that they are still blue. The ones on the rear are only borderline identifiable as shocks. Any recommendations on decent budget shocks for a 1982 RRC? I can't really justify a set of Koni or Spax on a car whos value was doubled by adding a set of JATE rings.
So, in short, I spent the weekend freezing my arse off trying to keep a Range Rover on the road and in usable condition for offroad usage.
I love it.
P.