Norfolk Garage
Not all owners of classic Land Rovers are lovely folk... Just ask Richard Hall
FROM time to time I get a call to tell me that a vehicle I have recently worked on has broken down, or developed some other symptom to suggest that the work I have done has been in some way unsatisfactory. I hate it when this happens: even though it is part and parcel of working on vehicles which are in some cases more than half a century old, my first instinct is still to beat myself up over my failure to do the job right first time. If I have made a mistake, or fitted a component which turns out to be defective, I will always try to put things right, but I would much rather find that I have not got it wrong in the first place.
A while ago I had an email from a customer whose engine I had rebuilt six months previously. As part of the job I had fitted a new clutch kit from a reputable manufacturer. The clutch had failed, he had been charged £600 by another garage for a new one, and now he wanted some money back off me. For a clutch to fail within such a short time there seemed to me to be four possibilities: a crankshaft oil seal failure, a manufacturing defect in the clutch itself, a fault in the clutch release mechanism preventing the clutch from engaging, or brutal abuse of the clutch by the driver. The owner sent me a copy of the garage bill which didn’t include a replacement crank seal or any other bits apart from the clutch, so I gave them a call.
The mechanic I spoke to remembered the vehicle well. The bellhousing had been half full of mud and sand, and the clutch plate worn down to the rivets. Confronted with this, the owner admitted that he had taken the vehicle to a pay and play site several times and spent most of the day up to the windows in muddy water, without taking any basic precautions such as fitting a wading plug to the bottom of the flywheel housing. I declined to contribute to the cost of the new clutch.
To be fair, it is very rare to have someone “try it on” in this way. One of the very best things about working on elderly classic Land Rovers is that the people I meet are, almost without exception, lovely folk. Seriously, you couldn’t hope to find a nicer bunch of people anywhere than the ones who limp their broken Land Rovers through the doors of the Norfolk Garage. So I try my best to look after them, and when things go wrong (as they sometimes do) I take it on the chin. If I’m not happy with a job that I have done, the vehicle doesn’t go out until it is right, even if I have to do the whole thing again at my own expense.
All of which leads in nicely to the very smart-looking Series III which, as I write this, is sitting in the workshop awaiting collection. It first came to me some months ago with a very tired 2.5 diesel engine which had started life in a London taxi and had probably done an intergalactic mileage before finding its way into the Land Rover. For a short time in the 1980s the FX4 taxi used a variant of the 12J naturally-aspirated diesel fitted to the Ninety and One Ten. This engine (also designated 14J/15J and found in the big Sherpa 300 Series Commercials) had a high-mounted injection pump which meant it dropped straight into the Series chassis without modification. There are still a few of these engines around, but replacement timing belts are hard to find, and the timing case has a big aperture at the bottom which is less than ideal for a vehicle intended to be used off-road. I had a recently-rebuilt 12J engine available, freshly-removed from a One Ten in favour of a 200Tdi, so I fitted this and the owner was very happy.
Now the vehicle was back in the workshop to fit parabolic springs all-round and take a good look at the gearbox, which had started jumping out of second gear. This was the third vehicle to come in for a spring change in just over a month: it is hard, heavy work but fairly straightforward unless the shackle pins have rusted into the chassis bushes, in which case all estimates of time to do the job go out of the window. This one didn’t fight me, and was soon sitting about two inches higher than when it came in – the old springs were so badly worn that the vehicle was almost on the bump-stops.
If you are planning to do this job yourself, there are a few things to bear in mind which will make your life easier:
1. Make sure the vehicle is properly supported on level, solid ground with decent axle stands. I cannot emphasise this point enough. I jack the vehicle, place two stands under the chassis rails, my long tractor jack under the front bumper or rear crossmember as appropriate, and two short stands under the axle as an insurance policy in case the jack hydraulics fail while one of the springs is off the vehicle.
2. Only change one spring at a time. If you remove both springs there will be nothing to stop the weight of the differential from trying to rotate the entire axle.
3. When you come to drop the axle into place on the first spring, it will make life easier if you slightly loosen the ‘U’ bolts on the opposite side.
4. When changing the front springs, unbolt the propshaft from the front differential. The sliding splines on the front propshaft are not long enough to allow the axle to drop down fully when the front shock absorbers are removed.
5. If possible, weigh the individual springs before fitting and fit the lightest ones on the passenger side. In theory, parabolic springs are non-handed, but you would be surprised how much variation there can be in two springs from the same batch. Lighter springs contain less metal and are likely to be slightly
weaker than heavier ones.
6. Make sure you fit the shackle plates and pins correctly. Front shackle plates have the welded bosses at the bottom (narrow on the outside, wide on the inside), and of the eight short shackle pins, the four with the longest threaded portion are for the shackle plates on the rear springs. The ones with the shorter thread go at the front of the springs.
7. Once the springs are fitted, leave all the shackle pins and nuts slightly loose (around a quarter turn). Drive the vehicle up and down the bumpiest bit of road or land you can find (don’t worry, the springs won’t fall off provide the locknuts are in place). Once the new springs have been settled in this way, only then should you tighten the shackle pins and nuts.
With the new suspension in place, I made a fresh cup of tea and set about removing the gearbox. Like most Series vehicles this one had a non-removable gearbox crossmember, which meant removing the floors, transmission tunnel and seatbox before craning the gearbox and transfer box out through the passenger side door. There are a lot of fasteners to undo, and on a vehicle where the transmission has been undisturbed for a long time, most of these fasteners will be seized and corroded. This particular vehicle had been restored not long previously and came apart without too much drama. I would however beg anyone restoring a Land Rover themselves not to put it together with extra-long fully-threaded bolts and Nyloc nuts. Some of the seatbox bolts on this vehicle were 40mm long, holding together two pieces of metal with a total thickness around 3mm. If I ever become Prime Minister, the use of excessively-long fasteners will be made a criminal offence.
Series gearboxes come apart easily, especially once you have done a few. They are held together almost entirely with British Standard fasteners, almost all of which have heads which neither AF nor metric sockets will quite fit. This particular gearbox demonstrated a novel solution to the tool problem, with 3/8” UNF nuts mashed onto the BSF threads in various places. This kind of bodgery is usually a bad sign, but once I had the gearbox stripped things didn’t look too bad. The mainshaft and layshaft were undamaged, and the teeth on third and fourth gears looked just fine. First and second were, however, in less good shape.
Until the end of Series IIA production in 1971, Series Land Rovers had synchromesh only on third and fourth gears. For the Series III, Solihull managed to squeeze a baulk-ring synchromesh unit between first and second gear, in what was already a very compact gearcase. It was an ingenious piece of adaptation, but the baulk rings were arguably a little small for the job. The problem is that the rotating bits in a Series gearbox are big and heavy by modern standards, with a lot of inertia behind them. The function of the baulk rings is to act as a brake, matching the speed of the gear and synchromesh hub as they are brought together. Series III gearboxes need slow, deliberate changes: too quick a gear change will beat the synchromesh and bring the gears together with an audible crunch. It doesn’t help that the throw between first and second gear on a Series III ’box is much shorter than that between third and fourth.
First and second gears engage with the synchromesh hub via a ring of small pointed ‘dog teeth’. Too many crunchy gear changes will take the pointed tips off the dog teeth and wear the sides, reducing them to tapered blobs. Once this happens the worn gears will tend to try forcing themselves away from the hub under load, causing the gearbox to jump out of gear. Sure enough, on this gearbox the dog teeth were worn well beyond what I would regard as acceptable. The synchromesh hub itself had several portions of tooth missing around the retaining notches which stop the baulk rings from rotating in the hub. This is a common fault on these gearboxes and if you drain the gearbox oil and find portions of gear tooth in the bottom of the drain plug, this is probably where they have come from.
Satisfied that I had found the cause of the problem I ordered new first and second gear clusters, synchromesh hub and baulk rings, as well as a new reverse idler (the old one had the usual damaged teeth from drivers selecting reverse gear while the vehicle was still rolling forward), bearings, seals and gaskets. Parts availability for these gearboxes is generally good with several suppliers: the gears and hub I purchased this time were made in Italy, while the baulk rings came from Turkey. Everything went together with no problems, and soon enough the gearbox was mated to the transfer box (untouched apart from new output seals) and ready to go back in. But first I had another problem to attend to.
Remember that I had replaced the engine a few months earlier? Normally when I fit a secondhand engine I replace the crankshaft rear oil seal as it is an engine-out job to change and I don’t want to be doing it under warranty in my own time. This engine had been supplied by a reputable reconditioner less than a year before I acquired it and showed no signs of oil seeping from the drain hole on the flywheel housing, so I had taken the decision to leave the seal alone. When removing the gearbox I had noticed wet, black oil in the bottom of the flywheel housing – not a huge amount, but enough to warrant investigation.
I removed the clutch and flywheel to be confronted by a spotlessly clean, dry crankshaft seal. So I turned the flywheel over, and straight away spotted the lines of black oil radiating out from the bolt holes. When fitting the flywheel to any of the five-bearing engines (from 2.25 through to 300Tdi) it is essential to use thread sealant on the bolts. This had not been done, with the result that small quantities of oil were able to migrate along the bolt threads and escape via tiny imperfections in the mating face between the flywheel and the end of the crankshaft. If I hadn’t spotted the problem before refitting the gearbox, I suspect the vehicle would have come back in a couple of months’ time with oil dripping from the drain hole, as a warranty job. I wouldn’t be inclined to blame the reconditioner: most likely the engine was supplied as a “short” or “stripped” unit, with the flywheel to be supplied and fitted by the purchaser.
With this bullet dodged, I set about the rather tedious task of refitting the transmission and doing up about ten thousand seatbox and floor fasteners, this time using bolts of an appropriate length. With the transmission filled with fresh, golden EP90 gear oil I started the engine, reversed out of the workshop and found I could not select first gear. Second went in with a bit of wrestling, and eventually I managed to engage first, but a short test drive was enough to tell me that this was not just a case of stiff new components needing to bed in. Something was badly wrong somewhere.
What are weekends for, if not for unpaid rectification work? Saturday morning I arrived at the workshop bright and early, and probably set a new world record for
the shortest time ever taken to remove and strip a Series III gearbox. At first I could see nothing wrong, but close inspection of the new components provided an answer. The baulk rings have pointed teeth which match the dog teeth on the gear against which they bear. They are able to rotate within the synchromesh hub by about half a tooth each way from their central position. The idea is that the pointed ends of the baulk ring teeth feed into the gap between the teeth on the hub, guiding the dog teeth on the gear itself into alignment. That would be fine if the teeth on the baulk rings actually had a sharp point on them: on these brand-new rings, the teeth had rounded ends which would only feed into the hub if the alignment was spot-on to start with. They were badly-made junk of the sort that gives aftermarket suppliers a bad name.
As it happens, the baulk rings on Series
III gearboxes are pretty long-lived. They are one of those components which are routinely replaced as part of a gearbox overhaul because they are cheap, irrespective of whether they are worn or not. I rummaged through my box of used gearbox bits and found six old baulk rings – all had nice, sharply-pointed teeth and unworn friction surfaces. I selected the best two, cleaned them up and reassembled the gearbox. After another round of intense spannering, the vehicle was ready for test drive number two: had I solved the problem? I depressed the clutch, shoved the gear lever left and forward and found first gear with no problem. Ditto second gear. It is always satisfying to have fixed something, but I felt a little vexed at having lost an entire day to a tenner’s worth of defective parts which didn’t need changing anyway. I will be taking up the issue with the supplier: for now I advise anyone buying new baulk rings (part number 591364) to examine them carefully before fitting.