Norfolk Garage
After 35 years of getting away with some unsafe working practices, Richard Hall pays the price
THE PHRASE ‘health and safety’ has acquired some very negative associations over the years. We think of Health & Safety officers as people who are there to stop everyone else from doing anything at all, especially anything that might be fun. We all think we are perfectly capable of looking after ourselves: we are grown-ups and don’t need to be nagged and nannied as if we were kids. And little by little we become complacent.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have used ordinary 12-point sockets on an impact gun, and without any eye protection should the socket shatter and send sharp fragments in all directions. I have jacked up a vehicle and ducked underneath for a quick look without putting an axle stand in place first. I have carried out welding without having a fire extinguisher within easy reach. I have lifted engines using scruffy old chains and shackles with no tensile strength markings on them. I have grabbed an angle grinder to lop off a bit of metal without first putting on protective gloves and goggles. And currently I am typing this piece on the dining room table without regard to the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992.
See? There I go again, poking fun at health and safety legislation. And I really shouldn’t, because my left thumb is swathed in bandages following an entirely avoidable accident. I have spent ten hours in various hospital departments, have to return every few days to have the dressing changed, and all things considered I am lucky that my thumb is still attached to my hand rather than being in a clinical waste bin at the Norwich & Norfolk Hospital. I confess, 35 years of getting away with bad working practices made me complacent, and now I am paying the price.
My self-inflicted injury came right at the end of a long, complex job where nothing went quite according to plan. Readers may remember that last month I was about to start building up a 200Tdi engine around a secondhand block to replace one that had been destroyed when a connecting rod tried to exit through the side of it. The block appeared sound and
free of cracks, so I set the Boy to work stripping it down. The crankshaft was almost impossible to turn by hand: the Boy reported back that it was completely dry and devoid of lubricant, so I thought no more of it. The engine had been sitting around under my workbench for several years, and lying on its side on a canal towpath for some time before that.
The connecting rods appeared to be in good shape with new little ends recently pressed in. In fact all the bearing shells looked brand-new and I would have bet money on the engine not having run since they were fitted. With hindsight, alarm bells should have been starting to ring at this point, but I didn’t question why an engine should have been dumped for scrap after having had money spent on it. Instead I got the Boy to bolt the main bearing caps onto the block and sent it off to be rebored, very lightly refaced and thoroughly cleaned.
By the time it came back from the machine block I was up against a tight deadline and starting to feel a little apprehensive. The vehicle was due to go on a camping trip to the Scottish Highlands in a few days’ time and I didn’t have a lot of room left for things to go wrong. I decided to go in on a Saturday and build up the engine: I quite often do this kind of work at weekends as there is nothing worse than having the phone ring when you are half-way through the tightening sequence for 18 head bolts, then trying to concentrate on the call without forgetting whether you are on number eight or ten bolt, and on the first or second 60-degree torqueing operation. I mounted the block on my engine stand, thoroughly cleaned and blew through all the oil ways, removed and cleaned all five main bearing caps, broke out a new packet of shells, went to fit the upper shell to number one bearing, and spotted a problem.
The main bearing caps on the fourcylinder OHV Land Rover engines are located with two steel dowels, offset to ensure the bearing cap is fitted the right way round. The dowels are pressed into the block and normally protrude around 4 mm from the surface. On this engine the dowels on number one bearing were pressed almost flush with the block. I inspected further and found that the metal around one of the dowels had bulged and cracked. The crack was adjacent to the threaded hole for the bearing cap bolt. The block was scrap.
Establishing what had happened
Two indentations in the mating faces of the bearing cap told the tale of how the cap had been fitted the wrong way round and the retaining bolts tightened down, pushing the dowels into the block until the metal gave way. That explained the new bearing shells anyway. I cannot blame the Boy for failing to spot this, and there was no reason for the machine shop to have had the bearing caps off, so they would not have spotted it either. I like to think I would have noticed the problem if I had dismantled the engine myself, but I will just have to add this one to the list of mistakes I will not make again.
To the rescue on Monday came Avenger 4x4 in Peterborough, nearly two hours’ drive away in my little Peugeot 106. They had a 12L Discovery block on the shelf. By the end of the day it was on my engine stand: cleaning it up revealed a good set of standard bores well within tolerance, so I ordered another set of pistons rather than adding any further delay sending it off for an unnecessary rebore. 200Tdi engines are durable old lumps – I once stripped down one that had done nearly 300,000 miles and that went back together with nothing more than a light hone and a new set of standard pistons.
There was no way now I would have the vehicle ready for the original deadline. Luckily my customer was able to shift his holiday plans. I cleaned all the components, laid them out on the workbench, fitted the crankshaft to the block (with no problems whatsoever), unboxed a piston and tried to attach it to number one connecting rod. Normally this is a fairly simple operation. The gudgeon pin is a very close sliding fit in the piston,
“Alarm bells should have rung, but I didn’t question why an engine should have been dumped for scrap after having had money spent on it”
but with some lubrication will slide into place with just hand pressure. The pin is designed to be free-floating in both the piston and the little end and should not need to be pressed in. The only point to watch is that the piston must be fitted the right way round on the conrod.
After fiddling around for a minute or so I realised that the pistons and conrods on these engines were not going together as they should. The gudgeon pin refused to slide smoothly into the conrod bearing however much oil I applied. I wondered whether the gudgeon pin might be incorrectly sized, but I tried an old one from the scrap bin and got the same result. The little end bearings on these engines are plain phosphor-bronze bushes, pressed into the conrod. They need to be accurately reamed to size after fitting: this had not been done. I had removed the old pistons from the conrods by my usual technique of removing the circlips and drifting the gudgeon pins out with a big hammer, so I had not noticed that the pins were a little tight in the bushes.
What to do?
Sending the conrods away for bush reaming was the obvious answer but would have added yet more delay. The bushes were not massively undersized – the pins could be pressed in by hand, but they were tight. I decided to go for a bit of old fashioned fettling. I lightly sanded the inside of the bush on number one conrod with 320 grade wet and dry to take off any high spots, mounted an old gudgeon pin in a vice, coated it with fine grinding paste and worked the conrod carefully up and down over the pin, rotating it back and forth, repeatedly cleaning and testing it, until I had the clearance I was looking for. I then carried out the same operation for the other three conrods. It took about two hours in total, but that was the last of my engine-related woes. With all the components cleaned and laid out with their fasteners and gaskets, the engine practically assembled itself.
Refitting it took a little longer than normal. I am not arrogant enough to claim that my way of fitting a Discovery 200Tdi engine into an older Ninety or One Ten is the only correct way. There are however a few things I like to see on a conversion, and these include an air filter. This vehicle was fitted with a snorkel, which had been connected to the turbo intake with flexible ducting, without any provision for stopping dust and grit from getting into the engine. I dug out a Discovery air cleaner and intake hose from my parts store, along with a standard radiator/intercooler pack. The vehicle had been fitted with the biggest intercooler I have ever seen on a Land Rover, taking up the whole of the space between the inner wings. I suspected it would do little other than increase turbo lag and block the cooling airflow through the radiator – junking it made space for the air cleaner.
Would it pass the MOT?
The engine fired up with no drama, ran sweetly and did not seem inclined to leak vital fluids onto the floor, so after some electrical fettling I set off to the MOT station. Two things quickly became apparent. Firstly, the fuelling had been played with to make the best use of the giant intercooler, so the engine shovelled out black smoke under power like an old Russian diesel locomotive. Secondly, the vehicle was almost undrivable as something had gone badly adrift with the gear change pattern. First and reverse seemed to be in the same place: moving the gear lever left and forward would engage one or the other, and there was no way to predict which. Third and fourth were unobtainable. Fifth was fine. I managed to make it to the test station, warned the MOT tester about the first/reverse issue, and by the end of the day the Ninety was back at my workshop with a fresh MOT certificate.
The fuelling was easy enough to deal with. I backed off the full-power fuelling screw almost one whole turn, which is a lot on these engines, and reset the idle speed. It ran fine with far less smoke and no discernible loss of performance or throttle response. The gear change took a bit more work. There is a rubber cover on top of the gear change tower, beneath which are two bias springs, adjusting bolts and locknuts. The purpose of these is to allow the gear lever positioning to be adjusted so that with no sideways pressure applied it will smoothly engage third and fourth gear. Normally the two adjusting bolts are set to the same depth to achieve this: on this gearbox one bolt was screwed all the way in, the other all the way out, biasing the lever to the first/ second plane instead.
On a healthy LT77, first and second are easy to find as there is a spring-loaded stop which protects reverse (to the left of first). This is a separate unit, bolted onto the side of the gear change tower and adjusted via shims. I removed the stop unit, stripped it and found that the ballbearing inside it had rusted, and that the plunger was seized in the housing. It went back together with a new ball bearing and plenty of grease, and I had to remove one
of the shims to get first and second to select cleanly. Resetting the bias springs gave me third and fourth, and adjusting the depth stop on the left side of the gear change tower stopped the gear lever from being pushed too far to the right, beyond the gate for fifth gear.
The final job
The last thing to do was to refit the gear lever and it is worth mentioning that this should be angled so that the top points slightly towards the driver. The lever is a splined fit on the shaft to allow for left or right hand drive configurations. Many people fit it pointing straight ahead which makes for an awkward stretch to reach first and reverse. Road test time, and this has to be one of the most satisfying jobs I have ever done. In under an hour (including the time to remove and refit the transmission tunnel) the vehicle was completely transformed. No one would ever describe the gear change on an LT77 as slick, but this one shifted smoothly and easily, just as it should.
I arranged for the customer to collect the vehicle the next day, and an hour before he turned up I decided to give it a final check over. With a major job like this I always worry that I might have missed something, and it does no harm to check. All seemed well under the bonnet but there was a slight rattle just off idle which sounded as though it was coming from the front of the engine. Poking around an engine which is running is sometimes necessary to diagnose faults, but it is potentially very dangerous and you need to concentrate on what you are doing. Rotating belts, pulleys and fans can do a great deal of damage in an instant.
I wasn’t thinking about the risks of working on a running engine. I was thinking about my customer’s impending arrival, and worrying about whether the rattle might be something I couldn’t fix before he turned up. On this particular 200Tdi conversion I had routed the intercooler pipe over the top of the alternator as I usually do. The Discovery 200 engine has a high-mounted alternator with an exposed cooling fan and no fan guard. I had just established that the rattle was coming from the intercooler pipe rubbing against the alternator when I misjudged the distance between the cooling fan and my hand, the result being that my thumb got caught between the alternator fan and the underside of the intercooler pipe. As I said at the start, I was very lucky not to lose my thumb altogether.
This kind of injury can happen to anyone. I have been working on old vehicles for a long time now, and on running engines thousands of times and it is easy to get complacent and think “that can never happen to me”. It can, and it did. Health and safety isn’t about risk avoidance: there is risk in almost any human activity. It is about being aware of the risks and managing them within acceptable levels. When working on your own Land Rovers, take your own safety seriously – no one else is going to manage your risk for you.