How to re-chassis
RICHARD HALL bought his first Land Rover, a Series III, just after his 18th birthday and has since owned, maintained and restored these vehicles for over 30 years now. He runs a small Land Rover repair and restoration business in Norfolk and every month he lets off steam in LRM.
SOME years ago I decided to stop offering a chassis replacement service for older Land Rovers after I found out the hard way that it is very difficult to make money out of this kind of work without cutting corners in all directions. I get a steady stream of rechassised and rebuilt vehicles through the workshop and never cease to be amazed at how many different ways there are to assemble a Land Rover incorrectly. These vehicles were basically hand-built at the factory, with all the major components aligned using shims, slotted holes and deft use of wooden mallets on the production line. After 40 or 50 years’ hard use just about everything will be slightly bent and distorted. If you just throw the vehicle together the doors will not shut properly and the vehicle will rattle, leak like a sieve and give you all kinds of mechanical problems.
From time to time I allow myself to be talked into a chassis replacement, most recently on a Series III sold by a dealer for a five-figure sum, which turned out to have some outrageously bad chassis and bulkhead repairs lurking under the shiny paint and newly-upholstered seats. Dealers have been tarting up worn out, rotten Land Rovers to look superficially smart since about 1955 but that is no excuse. I see far too many so-called restorations which consist of little more than a fresh coat of paint blown over filler and rust, with no attention paid to structural or mechanical issues. This particular Series III drove reasonably well although the engine had that busy, chattery sound that I used to associate with early 1980s Talbots. The doors would not shut properly, various electrical items had stopped working and the steering was sloppy and stiff at the same time, which is quite an achievement.
Dismantling revealed some horrendous repairs to the bulkhead, to the point where it was easier to scrap it and find another one than to try and repair the old one. The rear body tub had been badly (and inexplicably) damaged along the front edge, with the seat box hacked and bent to fit. I spent a fair bit of time fabricating repair sections for these areas. The bulkhead was replaced with one which I picked up cheap a while ago. It had a rotten top rail and some damage to the door pillars where the wind had caught the doors and bent the check strap mounts back. The latter is a well known weak point on Series III bulkheads and also on military Defenders with the two-piece doors, which use the same inadequate check strap design. The top rail was replaced with one salvaged from a scrap Defender bulkhead: there is very little difference between the Series III and Defender bulkheads in this area.
When building up a vehicle on a new chassis the most important job is to get the door gaps and bulkhead positioning right so that the doors shut properly. Once you bolt on the floors, wings and roof the door alignment is locked into your build, and if you then find that the door tops overlap the windscreen frame or the hard top sides you will have to undo a lot of fasteners before you can put things right. I mentally allow myself half a day for body alignment. The rear body tub goes on first – the rear edge bolts to the tabs on the rear crossmember and this point is fixed and non-adjustable. The only other non-adjustable dimension is the height of the bulkhead in relation to the chassis, so the first job is to temporarily bolt the bare bulkhead in place, secure it near enough upright and then check that the crease line along the top of the body sides lines up with the corresponding point on the door pillars. For this I use a technologically sophisticated optical body alignment tool: a length of string, held at one end by an assistant and pulled taut along the body crease line and over the outside edge of the door pillar.
Body tubs tend to sag slightly at the front
with age, and I quite often have to insert thin shims of packing material under the steel crossmembers that support the floor of the tub. Once I am happy with the height I can bolt the front edge of the body tub to the outriggers and then check the door gaps. The distance between the front edge of the body tub and rear edge of the door pillars, excluding door seal retainers, should be 34.5 inches or slightly more, and it should be the same from the top of the pillar to the bottom. The brackets at the front of the bulkhead which keep it upright have slotted holes for adjustment. If the door gap at the base of the pillar is too tight, one or more spacing washers can be inserted between the mounting foot and the bulkhead outrigger.
With the bulkhead solidly bolted to the chassis it is time to hang the doors. I find it easiest to fit the hinges to the door pillars first, then hang the doors on the hinges . The hinges attach to the pillars via captive nuts which have some fore and aft movement to adjust the door gaps. I will be looking for a straight, even gap all around the door, front, back and bottom. Once I am happy that the doors will close, the roof and windscreen can go on. The windscreen angle is adjustable via the screen clamps inside the vehicle and slightly oversize holes along the windscreen top rail.
On this particular Series III, at this stage I ran into trouble. With the hard top bolted down the top edges of both doors rubbed against the bottom of the hard top. There should be a gap of around an eighth of an inch – enough to avoid fouling while keeping the wind and water out. I played around with the hinges to try and lower the doors fractionally but they still kept catching. Eventually I worked it out. The vehicle had recently been fitted with new door tops. On Series vehicles there is a rubber sealing strip between the top and bottom halves of the door. For some unknown reason this vehicle had not one but two strips on each side, both incorrectly fitted. There is a lip on one edge of the seal which should run along the inside of the door, facing upwards. With one seal discarded and the other turned the right way around the doors closed perfectly.
This illustrates one of the great advantages of specialising in a small range of vehicles. Over time you build up a detailed knowledge of how the vehicles were put together at the factory, which means that it is easy to spot something that is not quite right, like that door top seal. Having got the basic vehicle structure sorted I turned my attention to plumbing up the brakes and clutch hydraulics, and fairly quickly spotted another issue which someone less familiar with the Series III might have missed. The vehicle was an 88 inch hard top, built in 1978 and fitted with 10 inch drum brakes all round. I picked up the brake servo unit ready to attach it to the bulkhead and thought “that’s the wrong master cylinder”. The master cylinder used on vehicles with 10 inch drums and dual circuit brakes has a reservoir with rounded corners: this one had the square corners of the larger cylinder fitted in conjunction with 11 inch front drums. I would guess that the vehicle left the factory with
single line non-servo brakes, as did most 88s of this age, and the servo and master cylinder were a later addition, salvaged from a scrapped post-1980 vehicle.
The Land Rover Series III parts catalogue does not list a master cylinder for a servo-equipped 88 inch vehicle with 10 inch front drums: the part number you need is 569671. If you have an 88 with single line brakes and want to fit a Series III pedal-mounted servo things get far more complicated. The only vehicle I have found which has a master cylinder of the correct diameter and bolt pattern was used on certain models of Vauxhall Victor in the early 1970s. A remote servo of the type fitted to MGB sports cars is a more practical option. A cylinder of larger diameter than that originally specified will give a firmer, shorter travel brake pedal, but Newtonian physics being what they are, the trade-off is a much greater pedal effort required to stop the vehicle. Even with the correct master cylinder, Series brakes are not exactly known for being light and sensitive.
The Series III gradually came together over a period of several days, with virtually every single component requiring straightening, repair or replacement. Even the steering lock had been wrecked by a baboon with a large hammer so that it no longer disengaged properly when the key was turned. This probably explained why, when I dismantled the vehicle, I found the lock assembly loose on the column and held in place with duct tape. Eventually I was able to fire up the old beast and a quick drive around the yard confirmed that it all felt fit and healthy. The steering was absolutely transformed, thanks to a new relay and the replacement of various missing mounting bolts on the steering box and column. The entire steering box had been moving around when the wheel was turned. Dodgy dealers always seem to have access to an MOT tester who will turn a blind eye to dangerous defects. I have no idea how these people sleep at night.
One problem remained to be sorted, the noisy valve gear. I whipped the rocker cover
off and found that all the valve clearances were huge, and consistently huge. I suspect someone had mixed up their feeler gauges and set the clearances at 25 thousands of an inch rather than 0.25 mm. While I was doing the job I spotted something out of place. The rocker shaft on these old Land Rover pushrod engines is supported on five pedestals, held down with a cylinder head bolt on one side and a long 5/16” (later 8 mm) bolt on the other. The pedestals are split so that tightening the long bolt clamps the rocker shaft to stop it sliding lengthways. There is, or at least should be, a threaded pin in number two pedestal which engages with a hole in the rocker shaft to ensure that it is correctly located and all the oil feed holes line up. On this engine the pin was missing, which meant that oil was free to flow out of the hole rather than being forced into the rockers. No obvious harm seemed to have been done so I rummaged through my big pile of Series bits and found an incomplete rocker assembly which yielded a replacement pin.
The rocker cover went back on with new rubber seals under the caps (one of those consumable parts which no one ever seems to replace) and when I started it up, it absolutely purred. I reckon it must have been rebuilt at some point in the not too distant past. Series petrol engines do not age especially well, they gradually lose compression and horsepower and often feel a bit flat and gutless although seeming to run well. This one revved willingly, sounded crisp and pulled strongly through the rev range, giving decent performance even though the vehicle is running 3.54 Defender differentials which rather knock the edge off the acceleration.
It is always rewarding to take a crumpled, broken and worn-out Land Rover and turn it into something which is a pleasure to drive and feels as though it will last another 50 years. That is probably why I keep taking on these big restorations even though I tell everyone that I don’t do them any more. But please don’t ask me if I will take yours on: I have already committed to doing another three this year, which is plenty.