Steering guards

Paul,

What vehicle?

Neil

Ah - oops.

Disco 1 200TDiS

P.

Paul,

Bolts thru the steering on the drivers side and the appropriate hole in the chassis at the other side, the top bolts thru the bumper mounts....can't recall the bolt sizes....

Neil

There are a lot of holes down there, IIRC the radius arms came into it somewhere on mine, as did the bumper mounting. But there should be only 1 place for it to fit, if you hold it up.

Craddocks should have supplied any additional bolts you need, although it may be that you're just using existing bolts.

The steering guard was the hardest job I did on mine. It took the best part of a weekend, because the bolts were an absolute bugger to get undone, and the steering guard didn't quite fit so had to be bulldozed into place between the chassis members using a hydraulic jack. If you get one that fits OK it should probably only take a couple of hours. But they're very heavy and difficult to manouevre on your own.

David

David French posted ...

Is this the one from 'Discoparts' ?

I've bought strops etc from them before and found them great, just wondered what the steering guard from them was like ;)

Don't know yet as it's STILL not arrived... :) At this rate I'll be getting my Patriot roof rack (ordered today) before the steering & diff guards.

The one I had on my Disco 1 was a Scorpion one, with jacking & recovery points. Very nice, but quite pricey as I recall.

David

David French posted ...

Yeah, just looked again, and they're made to order .. have a nice wait .. ;)

I've looked at these too, can't make my mind up. Front recovery points would save having to buy Jate rings I guess. We just ordered a cheap (Paddocks) front Diff guard, 'cos we figure that while they are necessary, they are also much of a muchness, 'specially with a steering guard as well, but we really want a rock-slider/rear diff guard I reckon, though it [1] does seem to be my front end that grounds more than the rear. I rarely reverse off-road .. ;)

The nice thing about the QT rocksliders is that they have a leading edge which protects the UJ a bit as well, and I have seen those damaged by hitting bigass rocks while driving.

P.

Collecting next Tuesday - they have most of the bits on the shelf. I was a little disappointed that on top of the manufacturing price they charge £45+VAT for fitting, or the same for delivery in bits, or you can collect but they STILL charge £15 for the packaging (plus I realised the only place I have to transport a 2.5m roof rack is, er, on the roof...) I'd have been happier if they'd quoted all-inclusive, maybe not for the delivery but at least for ONE of the options.

The ability to jack or recover from the guard was very handy. Nobody seems to make a jackable Disco II steering guard yet, otherwise I'd have bought one. Mark from Discoparts says it should be possible to jack from a shackle in the recovery eye on his ones, although I'm not sure how this will impact (literally) the plastic spoiler.

I did have a Southdown front axle guard on the Disco I, which was great for protecting all the steering bits (more so than the steering guard, given the Disco's steering design), but acted as a big sledge, or later a sea-anchor, in mud. Which is why I've ordered the QT front diff guard and rear slider, although from what Paul Brown was saying, I may live to regret the rear slider :)

David

Hi,

Clearance under the diffs is always a moot point. Adding something under there without getting larger tyres always seemed quite bizarre to me...but then....I guess some people find my choice of modifications quite odd too ;-)

You can guarantee they'll see action if you don't fit bigger tyres tho!

Neil

Neil Brownlee posted ...

Heheheh, it had 31 x 105 x 15's on when I got it, and when I replace them it'll have the same again .. ;) BFG A/T's and they're damned good, even though they only have about 5mm of tread left.

They do scrape the rear body a little at the extreme ends though, but wtf, I have some tin shears that I've been a bit wary of using as yet .. but when we do do a bit more off-roading we'll 'modify' the rear to properly accept the bigger tyres .. ;)

For now I just grin a bit when we hear the groaning ..

David French posted ...

LOL, it's all compromises whatever you do I guess.

Yeah, we looked at the Southdown stuff too .. looks very good, if a bit agricultural, not that that's a bad thing necessarily. We don't go in for shed loads of mud, but prefer more technical stuff, slow and steady and 'getting over' things .. more like Trials bike riding (which we also do) than motocross .. ;)

Following up to myself in the true spirit of "Let's turn Google into an Expert System"

It's not actually too bad to fit one of these.

First thing is that it really makes life a lot easier if you remove the front valance before starting.

To remove the front valance, first find all of the studs which secure it to the bumper (there are 8 of them) and soak them all in WD40 if you ever want to re-fit the valance. Then take the nuts off - they are a 10mm size and fairly easy to wield a ratchet around.

You will also need to either split the valance from the bumper ends, or - as I did - remove the trims as well.

Once you have done this then you want to remove the towing eye on the near side. The bolt heads on this are 13mm. The way I did it was to slacken off both nuts so the tow hitch rattled loose then completely remove the bottom bolt and swing the tow hitch out of the way and then replace the bottom bolt before removing the top bolt and removing the tow hitch completely.

Do up the top bolt again to roughly as tight as seems right ("A quarter turn" as my dad puts it - when asked "A quarter turn what?" the answer is "A quarter turn past bloody tight") Leave the bottom one floating loose.

Slacken off the bottom bolt securing the bumper to the chassis on the driver side - remove the nut and leave the bolt floating loose.

Now comes the damn awkward bit.

Make sure you have a 19mm spanner and a 19mm socket - at a push mole grips will do instead of the spanner, but you need something that size.

You are now looking to remove the centre bolt of three in the large assembly attached to the ?panhard rod? on the drivers side - the bolt that goes through the bracked and through the chassis.

This bolt will take a *lot* of turning, but keep going. A breaker bar will be useful here as it will be jammed solid.

Remove the nut from the bolt and then screw it back on a few turns.

Now get a nice big hammer and clout the nut several dozen times until the nut is touching the chassis.

Remove the nut at this point and gently tap the bolt a few times until it is flush with the chassis - make damn sure not to hit the threads on the bolt.

There are 2 ways you can go now. The easy one is probably to get a drift of some kind and stick it in the back of the bolt and then use the drift to drive the bolt out of its hole.

The other way is the one I ended up using - clamp a set of mole grips around the bolt shaft just before the bolt head and then while holding the bottom of the mole grips hit the top of them with the hammer repeatedly until the bolt pops free.

Remove the bolt from the inside of the OSF wheel where it has just ended up.

Save the bolt.

Go to Homebase and buy an M10x110 coach bolt.

Now the fun starts.

Take the steering guard and offer it up to the outside of the chassis rails where the bumper is attached. If yours is like mine you will now need to take it back down and do some panel beating because it's 2mm too narrow.

Once it is the right width, offer it back up to the outside of the bumper mounts and push the bolts you left floating free earlier throught the bumper mounts and then through the holes in the steering guard. Loosely put the nuts back on the bumper mount bolts (less than finger tight).

You now have a steering guard hanging straight down below your bumper.

You can now swing the guard up and try to pair the hole on the offside with the hole you removed a large bolt from earlier.

On my guard it turned out that somebody had been optimistic with what the underside of a Disco looked like and the lashing eye fouled the guard by around 2mm. Once again liberal use of percussive maintenance prevailed and the guard could now be offered up.

Something to notice is that this guard was tight in every dimension - at this point I enlisted the aid of a small trolley jack to lift the trailing edge of the guard until the mounting hole and the chassis hole were level with each other.

Liberally spray the bolt with WD40. Your hands will thank you for it.

Now feed the bolt back through the mounting hole in the guard and into its old home. Once you stop being able to push it in apply a large hammer liberally until the bolt goes home. At this point feed the washer and nut back onto the other end of it and with your 19mm socket, ratchet and spanner do the whole assembly back up to roughly as tight as you can get it.

Go to the other side and repeat the palaver with the trolley jack, this time feeding the coach bolt you bought earlier from the inside out. Once the bolt is through the hole feed the washer and nut onto the bolt and do it up until it squeaks or thereabouts.

Now do up the bolts on the bumper mounts.

Congratulations. You have fitted a steering guard.

P.

Presumably in an alternative vehicle?

Works for me!

Disco for taking to bits, Rover 75 for actually going places in. Such is how it should be.

This will reverse at some point when I get a Torx impact driver and actually get around to doing the front discs on the Rover.

P.

Paul S. Brown posted ...

Heheheh ... lovely phrase that, percussive maintenance ... ;)

Nice read too .. ;)