Norfolk Garage
Want to recommission an old vehicle that’s been standing around for a while? Just ask Richard Hall
AFAIR PROPORTION of the work that comes through my door seems to consist of recommissioning old vehicles that have been standing out of use for a while. I have a nagging suspicion that the main reason I get so many of these jobs is that all the other Land Rover specialists in East Anglia have the good sense to turn them down. Reviving elderly Land Rovers is seldom straightforward. They have usually been laid up for a reason (or more likely a combination of several reasons), and standing around unused, often parked on grass or in a damp shed, will not have done them any favours.
As a result, a simple service and MOT job on a vehicle which has been off the road for a while can very easily turn into something not far short of a full restoration, which plays havoc with my already crowded schedule and stretches my ingenuity in trying to deliver a working vehicle back to the customer for a price which is not too outrageous when compared to the figure he or she originally had in mind. I have two of these resurrection projects currently going through the workshop. Two very different vehicles, both interesting in their own way.
I usually have at least one long-term project sitting around to fill in the odd hours, and vehicle number one fulfils that role admirably, as it will need an awful lot of odd hours to put it back on the road. It is a 1972 Series III 109 inch Station Wagon, with a Perkins 4.203 diesel engine under the bonnet in place of the original two-and-a-quarter. Back in the 1980s, when I first started messing around with old Land Rovers, the big Perkins four was a popular conversion for Series vehicles. 3.3-litres, heavy, slow-revving (63 bhp at 2600 rpm in road vehicle trim, less for the tractor variants) but durable, easy to work on and with stump-pulling torque. Most of them came out of Commer and Karrier light commercials, and there are still a few around.
This Station Wagon has been off the road for a long time. How long? Long enough that there is no record of it on the computerised MOT database, which means it hasn’t had an MOT test since at
least 2005. Someone must have loved it once: the chassis has been rubbed down and coated with red oxide, a treatment as old-fashioned as the Perkins engine but effective in preventing the main chassis rails from disintegrating. The rear crossmember is at the end of its life, but the rest of the chassis is sound as a pound. This must have been one of the first 109s to have the chassis rails pressed in two halves and welded top and bottom. The first Series IIIS had chassis made of four flat plates welded at the corners in the same fashion as every previous Land Rover. The pressed construction chassis tend to rot along the bottom seam due to moisture collecting inside. Not this one: the rails are solid from front to back.
Further evidence of a loving owner can be found inside the vehicle, where the dashboard is liberally scattered with extra gauges and switches. Most of the switches are unlabelled and have no obvious function, and there are large quantities of additional wiring under the bonnet, most of it coloured black. I suspect I will have to do what I normally do in such circumstances: strip out all the home-brewed electrics and see what still works. But first there are some structural problems to deal with. The bulkhead, like the chassis, is not in bad shape especially considering the vehicle had stood for so long. Someone had put foam insulation under the floor mats which had soaked up rainwater from the inevitable Land Rover leaks, so new footwells were needed. The Boy and I took advantage of one of the first warm, sunny days of spring to remove the front wings and (totally-rotten) radiator panel, allowing me to deal with the moth-eaten footwells and stitch some new metal into the driver’s side door pillar.
The next and more fiddly task will be to chase out the rot in the body framing. How many times have I heard people say “Land Rovers are aluminium, so they don’t rust”? Not so, and especially for a five-door Station Wagon. The doors are hung off a pair of large steel frames which consist of a sill rail at the bottom, a central door pillar (B-post) welded to the sill rail at right angles, and a box section steel structure (C-post) which slopes back at 45 degrees from the rear of the sill rail before kinking upwards to the vehicle waist line. The frames are attached to the bulkhead mounting feet at the front, and to the chassis (via outriggers and angle brackets) at the rear. This structure can rust almost anywhere, but the main rot spots are the base of the B-and C-posts. New side frames are very expensive: repair sections are available for the most common weak points, but a fair amount of dismantling is usually needed to get to the rust so that it can be cut out and new metal welded in. So I have all that to look forward to.
The vehicle came in with no brakes, which is unsurprising given how long it had been standing. It now has new cylinders and hoses all round. The engine starts easily despite the cold start device being disconnected: the Perkins 4.203 is fitted with a ‘Flamestart’ device in the air intake which sprays diesel over a heated electrical coil when the engine is cranked, creating flames which are drawn into the cylinders to aid cold starting. This sounds more dangerous than it is. The gearbox seems to engage gears happily enough, steering and suspension all look fine and there is an overdrive fitted (essential with a big Perkins if you don’t want to be overtaken by old men on bicycles). Tyres are shot. Is it worth resurrecting? Just a few years ago the answer would have been no. It is the kind of vehicle I would once have been delighted to acquire as a breaker, and would have been worth a few hundred quid at best. Nowadays even tatty Station Wagons fetch strong money, and although the new owner is putting a fair amount of cash into returning this old beast to the road, I can’t see him losing money if he then decides that a Perkins-engined Series III isn’t really what he is after.
On to vehicle number two, an earlyish Ninety which has been laid up for several years. Once again it is a Station Wagon, this time of the three-door seven seat variety, and in very original though scruffy condition. Under the bonnet is one of the last 2286cc petrol engines to come off the production line: this vehicle left Solihull a month or so before the petrol engine was upgunned to 2495cc and given an unleaded-compatible cylinder head. Liftup door handles and galvanised cappings distinguish these early Ninetys from the far more common 1986-on vehicles, and I must admit I rather like them. There cannot be many petrol-engined examples left: I have converted a fair few to Tdi power over the years, and probably ought to be feeling a little guilty. A four-cylinder petrol Ninety or One Ten is a very sweet and characterful vehicle, though slow and thirsty. I ran a petrol One Ten as my work vehicle for a year or so – its finest achievement was hauling a Ninety on an Ifor Williams beavertail trailer from Burnley to Bury St Edmunds. Second gear on the steep hills but the old girl never missed a beat.
The Ninety now in my workshop has been standing in a damp concrete-floored shed and its nether regions have suffered accordingly. Like the 109 it needs a new rear crossmember and footwells: again like the 109, the main chassis rails are remarkably sound. The vehicle had been sidelined with a failed alternator and leaking radiator, so the first task was to replace these. Early petrol Ninetys and One Tens have a narrower radiator than later vehicles, with a pair of aluminium infill panels at either end to fill the gap. I have no idea why Land Rover did this. A small radiator plus two panels cannot have been any cheaper than the full-width radiator fitted to the diesels, and the narrow radiator needed different hoses as well. I had a good used full-width radiator sitting around from a Tdi conversion so that went in along with an A127 alternator from a 2.5 turbodiesel to replace the dead 16ACR unit. The two types are fully interchangeable, sharing the same mounting points and drive pulley dimensions: the A127 seems more robust and reliable in my experience.
With the charging system now functioning I turned my attention to the electrics. Several light units had succumbed to corrosion on the bulb contacts which was easily scraped off, but the main problem was that the headlight switch was unreliable. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. New switches are not expensive, but before changing the switch I had one other line of attack to pursue. Almost every vehicle switch I have ever seen has the switch contacts enclosed and inaccessible to protect them from dust. However, the headlight and fog light switches on Ninety, One Ten and most Defender models are open-backed with the contacts readily accessible. I removed the steering column cowl, pointed an aerosol can of contact cleaner at the back of the headlight switch and gave it a good spray, working the switch back and forth as I did so. Success! And a double success as the foglight switch responded equally well to the same treatment.
A quick check over revealed that the brakes, steering and suspension were all in good order, although I will flush through the brake system with fresh fluid before the vehicle goes out. Brake fluid, as is well known, absorbs moisture over time. This reduces its boiling point and can lead to total failure when the brakes are worked hard. This is unlikely to be an issue with a lightly-used Ninety in Norfolk, but you never know. On to the welding and at this point everything came to a standstill when I cut off the old rear crossmember and about a foot of crumbling rear chassis fell to the floor. I then offered up the new one and realised I had been sent a crossmember for a One Ten by mistake. The actual crossmember itself is the same, but has a pair of extensions welded to it to replace the last few inches of the chassis rails, which always rot where they curve down just forward of the crossmember. I put the unwanted crossmember up for sale on ebay and went home in a mood.
I could have done without this delay, because guess what I have coming into the workshop in a few days’ time? Another recommissioning job. I haven’t seen this one yet: all I know is that it is a Series IIA Lightweight, and it has a Rover V8 under the bonnet. It will probably be an absolute nightmare to sort out, but this is one vehicle I’m really looking forward to driving at least.