Norfolk Garage
Discovery gearbox woes and ill-fitting parts
OLD Land Rovers bear almost no resemblance in their construction to any car you are likely to have worked on. They contain a huge number of components: everything is bolted or riveted together, often using slotted holes, shims and spacers to achieve the correct alignment which most manufacturers, even back in the 1970s, accomplished by making the components to an accurate shape and size in the first place. The vehicles were essentially handbuilt, but at a mass-produced price, and it is a wonder that production lasted as long as it did. It is astonishing to think that just three years ago you could still buy a brand-new Land Rover whose doors had been aligned on the production line by men wielding wooden wedges and rubber mallets.
As a result, when rebuilding (and especially rechassising) an elderly Land Rover it is far easier to put it back together the wrong way than the right way. This is especially likely if the vehicle was bought as a non-running basket case and it is the first Land Rover you have ever worked on. I see a few like that, and a bit of fettling can make a big difference to the way the vehicle looks and drives.
A typical example was a Series III 88 inch which recently came into the Norfolk Garage to be serviced and prepared for its first MOT test since being put on a new chassis. It turned out to have a couple of assembly issues which are quite common on rebuilt Series vehicles and therefore worth mentioning here. I spotted the first straight away when I started inspecting the suspension. Leaf-sprung Land Rovers have the springs attached to the chassis via a single bolt at the front of each spring and two bolts and shackle plates at the rear, to compensate for the change in effective spring length as the elliptical springs straighten out under load. The outer shackle plate on each spring has plain holes: the two bolts pass through these holes, through the spring and chassis bushes, and then screw into threaded holes in the inner shackle plate, with large Nyloc nuts on the ends to stop the bolts unscrewing themselves. On this vehicle,
two of the bolts were missing their Nyloc nuts. The bolts were far too short, with the ends protruding only a few millimetres beyond the face of the plates.
Further inspection revealed that the vehicle builder had got his suspension bits thoroughly muddled up. The front and rear shackle plates are the same overall length and distance between holes. The front plates have spacers to compensate for the difference in width between the chassis rails and the springs: there is a narrow spacer on the outer plate and a much wider spacer on the inner one. The rear shackle plates have no spacers as the spring mounting on the chassis is the same width as the spring. There are twelve spring bolts – one at the front and two at the rear of each spring. These come in two lengths: the four long ones go at the back of the front springs. The shorter bolts come in two flavours, four have a longer threaded portion than the others. The ones with the long threads are for the shackle plates at the back of the front springs. The ones with the short threads go at the front of all four springs, and if you try to use them at the back of the rear springs, the threads will bottom out on the shackle plates before the bolts are fully tightened.
On this vehicle the outer shackle plates with the thin spacers had been fitted on the rear, using bolts with the short threaded portion. Two of the long bolts had been used at the front of the rear springs. That meant that two short bolts had been fitted to the shackles on the front springs. I ended up having to undo all bar the front bolts on the front springs so that I could swap all the components around. Luckily the bolts had been lubricated with copper grease so everything came apart easily enough. Meanwhile I had noticed another assembly problem. The engine and gearbox were not sitting straight in the chassis – the engine was visibly skewed, and the owner told me he had been unable to refit the driveshaft for his capstan winch as it caught on the edge of the hole through the front crossmember.
The gearbox is bolted to the centre crossmember using two brackets and rubber mounts. The brackets look similar but they are not the same – one has more offset than the other. On this vehicle the brackets had been transposed side to side. This meant, among other things, that the gear lever assembly did not sit centrally in the hole in the transmission tunnel. If the brackets are unbolted there is usually just enough room to jack up the gearbox, fiddle the brackets out through the narrow space above the crossmember, then refit them the other way around. Having done this you should then loosen the nuts on the engine mounts and lift the front of the engine an inch or so, then drop it back onto the mounts. This should take out any stresses in the mounting rubbers and allow the engine to settle naturally into the correct position.
While on the subject of Series engine mounts, there is one more assembly error which I have seen several times, although not on this particular Series III. There should be a wedge-shaped steel bracket between the offside engine mounting rubber and the chassis. If this is left out, the threaded stud on the mounting rubber
will drop through a hole in the chassis bracket. People think that is where it should go, and put a nut on the end of it. This will tear the rubber mount in half within a fairly short time.
If you have just completed a rebuild it will do no harm to get someone else to have a quick look over it, especially if it is your first attempt at restoring a Land Rover. Many of these vehicles have had all kinds of bodged and inept repairs over the years, and faithfully reassembling the vehicle the same way it came apart does
not guarantee that the end product will be right. I recently had a Series IIA come in with the brake pedal almost on the floor. It had newish rear brake shoes, but the return springs had been fitted incorrectly, with the top spring attached across the two shoes rather than between the leading shoe and the backplate. It turned out that the new shoes had been fitted by the owner, and he had carefully noted the way the springs were attached before removing the old shoes. The result was to perpetuate the previous owner’s mistake.