Norfolk Garage
No day is ever the same at Richard Hall’s workshop
IT’S A funny little business, the Norfolk Garage. I don’t actually see a lot of the routine oil and filter change work that pays the bills at most larger garages. My customers tend to be Land Rover enthusiasts who are more than happy to tackle simple servicing work themselves and leave me to deal with the trickier stuff. As a result, the pattern of work is entirely random and unpredictable. For a period of around six months last year I was not asked to carry out a single Tdi conversion, yet over the last two months I have fitted three 300Tdis into One Tens, three 200Tdis into Series IIIS, overhauled and bench-tested another 200Tdi for a customer to install himself, and I now have another 200Tdi sitting on the floor waiting to go into a Ninety, and a 300Tdi conversion to follow that.
Financially speaking these conversions are good news: I can predict the costs and time taken with a reasonable amount of certainty, and nine times out of ten the engines go in, fire up and drive with no trouble at all. This little flurry of engine conversions did however present me with a bit of a problem in writing this month’s column. I have been doing these conversions for years, they are all done the same way, and unless some unrelated defect turns up during the conversion they don’t really leave me with a lot to write about. So I was glad to be able to take a few days’ break from fitting engines and turn my attention to one of my long-term projects, a 1959 Series II 109 inch truck cab.
I have mentioned this one a couple of times before, and it really is something rather special. It was supplied new to a Land Rover dealer in Suffolk, fitted with a crane and used for many years for recovery work. By the time it was retired from service the chassis was starting to look a little moth-eaten, so the vehicle was completely dismantled in the dealership workshop, all the bits put into boxes, and a new galvanised chassis purchased. The axles were fitted to the chassis and that was as far as the project got. It languished in pieces in a storeroom until all the dealership staff with experience of working on Series vehicles had retired, leaving no-one who knew what all the bits in boxes were, or how they fitted together.
My first-ever Land Rover restoration back in 1990 was a Series II ex-recovery truck, and in the years since then I have dismantled, rechassised and reassembled most of the major Series variants, so the idea of putting this giant threedimensional jigsaw puzzle back together did not bother me. The first task was to go through all the boxes and try to work out which bits if any were missing. I very quickly realised that I had on my hands a highly original and unmolested vehicle, with all the defective bits of design that Land Rover changed after the first couple of years’ production. It had the original 151 engine with swan-neck exhaust manifold, Series I pattern rear brakes, pendant-arm front axle swivels and a tiny level plug on the transfer box, on which the head had rounded off as they always did. The brief was to get the vehicle back together and drivable, while keeping as many original parts as possible.
I stripped the bulkhead, welded in new footwells and sent it back to the dealer who put it through their paintshop along with the other body panels. The vehicle was originally delivered in Mid Grey, but at some stage had been given a coat of bright yellow paint over all the exterior panels, leaving the inside of the cab untouched. It was decided to reproduce this finish on the restored vehicle so the bulkhead was painted grey, masked off and then overpainted yellow in the appropriate areas (upper front panel and door pillars). The doors were given the same treatment – yellow on the outside, grey on the inside. They are rather special in themselves, being Canadian-market one-piece items. My understanding is that this option was only offered for a short time at the start of Series II production, after which the remaining stocks of doors were fitted to Uk-market vehicles supplied to favoured customers (such as Land Rover dealers). They were constructed in the same way as the regular two-piece doors, rusted in the same places, and the pair on this vehicle are the only ones I have ever seen.
With the bulkhead and rear body tub loosely bolted to the chassis I set about what is probably the most important task in restoring a Land Rover: setting up the body alignment and panel gaps. This stage cannot be rushed or skipped: if you just bolt everything together as it falls onto the chassis you will find that the doors do not shut properly, the body
panels do not line up with each other, and the end result will look horrible no matter how shiny the paintwork. So it is worth going into this part of the restoration in a little more detail.
The only fixed, non-adjustable body mounting is the row of tabs along the back where the body tub is attached to the rear crossmember. So I start by ensuring that the tub is square and central on the chassis and pushed firmly back against the tabs, to which it is then bolted. The next stage is to drop the bulkhead into place, insert the long bolts that attach the bulkhead mounting feet to the outriggers, do the nuts up finger-tight, then loosely bolt the two vertical supports to the footwell and chassis.
Body tubs quite often sag at the front due to years of overloading and misuse. The height of the bulkhead is not adjustable, so any height adjustment has to be done on the tub. I run a piece of string along the crease line on the upper body, from the rear corner all the way along to the corresponding crease line at the top of the door pillar. If the string sits above the crease line at the front of the tub, the tub has sagged. This can be compensated by levering the front of the tub up slightly off the chassis and inserting packing pieces between the underfloor crossmembers and their support brackets. I use pieces of axle check strap glued in place.
Once you are happy with the tub height the front end can be bolted to the tabs on the body outriggers. If you have had to pack the crossmembers as described previously, you may need to redrill the holes in the body mounts. Now take a tape measure and check the distance between the rear face of the door pillar and the front edge of the body tub (excluding mounting flanges for the door seals). You are looking for an even gap of 34.5 inches top, middle and bottom, and you probably won’t have it. Start at the bottom, inserting washers in between the bulkhead mounting foot and outrigger until you achieve the desired gap.
Moving to the top, you will usually find that the bulkhead sits inclined slightly back from the vertical and needs pulling forward. The supports have slotted holes where they bolt to the footwells and chassis, and you should be able to achieve the desired positioning provided the footwells have not been badly repaired. I use ratchet straps attached to something solid (usually another Land Rover) to carefully tension the bulkhead until the door gap is correct at the top, at which point all the support bracket bolts are tightened and the ratchet straps released.
Now you have the chance to find out how good your measurements are. Take your doors and hinges and attach them to the door pillars. The hinges should be tightly bolted to the doors as all the adjustment is done on the pillar mounts. Depending on the age of the vehicle you will either have hinge bolts into captive nut plates, or cross-headed screws into movable J-clips in oversize square holes. Either way there is a fair bit of adjustment on the hinges. Your aim is to get the door to sit square in the aperture with equal width gaps front and rear, and the crease line along the door lining up with those on the door pillar and body tub.
If your body alignment passes this test you are free to attach the wings, front panel, sill rails, seatbox and floors, safe in the knowledge that when you have finished you will have a vehicle with doors that shut properly. There is a good deal of interlocking between the various body panels, with different items being bolted at right angles to each other to form a sturdy, rigid structure. For this reason it is absolutely critical to get the door pillar alignment correct before building up the body. If the pillar angle or spacing need adjusting later on you will have a huge number of bolts to loosen before the pillar will actually move.
After a couple of days spent attaching hundreds of parts with thousands of nuts, bolts and screws, the yellow beast finally moved under its own power for the first time in very many years. Until you have built up an old Land Rover from its component parts it is hard to appreciate just how labour-intensive these vehicles were to build. I sometimes wonder whether Land Rover ever made any money on any of its utility vehicles: even a last-of-the-line Defender still has a ridiculous number of fiddly separate components compared to more modern designs. There is still plenty of work to do, but barring unforeseen accidents this old beast will still be around long after I have shuffled off to the great scrapyard in the sky. That is a happy thought.