A nice simple job
AFTER a week of baffling problems I was relieved to have a nice straightforward job come into the workshop. An early Ninety with a 200Tdi conversion, in for its annual service and MOT test. I have looked after this particular vehicle since I first set up the business some 15 years ago. It has had a fair bit of work done to it over the years, with major repairs to the chassis and bulkhead about six years ago, and a new gearbox the year before last. It doesn’t do many miles between its annual visits and the owner and I got on top of the usual old Land Rover maintenance backlog a long time ago, so I wasn’t expecting trouble.
Of course there were a couple of electrical niggles to deal with. Depressing the brake pedal illuminated the foglight tell-tale on the dashboard and extinguished one of the tail lights. No prizes for guessing that a faulty earth connection was to blame. The reversing light only came on when it felt like it and I wondered whether that might also be an earthing fault, but it turned out that the reverse light switch in the back of the gearbox just needed screwing in half a turn. The previous year’s MOT sheet had included an advisory on corroded front brake discs, and they had deteriorated badly since then as often happens with low-mileage vehicles, so the owner asked me to fit new discs and pads this time round.
The front discs on a Ninety (and the other Land Rover products that used the front axle design from the original Range Rover) are not as easy to change as on most modern cars. The discs are bolted to the back of the hubs rather than the front, and the brake calipers are big Lockheed four-pots on solid mountings, which need to be unbolted from the swivel housing before the disc / hub assembly can be pulled off the stub axle. Those caliper bolts are the cause of most of the problems: they have 12-point heads and are done up very tight. You need to take a clean, unworn 12-point socket and tap it firmly onto the bolt head before applying a breaker bar to it. Even then there is a risk that the bolt head will round off (especially if it is badly corroded) and then you are in some trouble as the bolt heads are recessed and hard to reach.
On this vehicle the bolt heads looked fairly clean and unrusted, and the first bolt on the nearside came out with no bother. I was a little surprised when I applied some pressure to the second and it sheared off flush with the mounting lug on the swivel housing. At least I could remove the caliper and hub. I then had the rather ticklish job of drilling out the remains of the broken bolt from the outside, dead central and square so as not to damage the threads in the housing. Faced with a job that has gone wrong like this it is important not to panic: be methodical, take your time and almost any problem can be overcome. In this case I very carefully drilled out the bolt, starting at 3 mm and gradually opening out in 1 mm steps, until at 10.5 mm the remains of the bolt could be carefully broken out with a fine chisel.
The caliper itself was in good shape, with unrusted pistons which retracted into the caliper body with very little effort. Feeling pleased at having got the job back on track I put the brakes back together with new caliper bolts and then turned my attention to the other side. The caliper on that side came off just fine, but two of the pistons were badly rusted and had pulled the dust seals and retainers away from the caliper body, so I ended up fitting new pistons and seals.
Surely nothing more could go wrong? As I was refitting the nearside front wheel I spotted what looked like a small rust hole in the front dumb iron, just behind the bumper mount. I poked it with my fingers and it turned into a large hole. The front of the chassis was full of wet mud and parts of the dumb iron were little thicker than an eggshell. I poked around the chassis a little more and found six other places where rot on the inside of the chassis had penetrated through to the outside and would need the rusty metal cutting out and replacing with good clean steel. My work schedule for the week now lay in ruins. Just another ordinary day at the Norfolk Garage.