Aye...still smiling
I'm having a bit of a mad push for the end at the moment...but things are pushing back...
1. Last time, I'd discovered that there was only one hole for the ECU cabling in my new Tdci seatbox, whereas the old Td5 one had two and much merriment was had over that fact, I can tell you. On top of that, the hole in the Tdci box is too big for the cable grommet, so some sort of "solution" had to be come up with and then it struck me that the old seatbox had the right size holes, so I could just cut them out and re-use them...
2. A "repair" section, ready to be fitted into place somehow...
3. ...I drilled the missing hole the right size...
4. ...and the plan was to fit the plate to the back of the seatbox, but I hadn't quite got the holes in the seatbox to match the ones in the plate and, I realised, the double-thickness of metal would be too thick for the cable grommet, so...
5. ...I just used the one hole - you can see the fixing bolt holes drilled here.
6. With a bit of "manipulation", the cabling fitted through, effectively, it's old hole again - job done
7. Here's what it looks like on the inside - some interesting tolerances etc, but only people inside the transmission tunnel will ever know and they tend to have other things to complain about.
8. The other cable fitted through its new hole.
9. Not sure what I'm trying to show here, but you can see the ECU "shelf" isn't in place, yet.
10. ECU in and wired up.
11. The underseat fusebox and some relays - I was considering fitting the relays upside-down so that the wiring was easier to get at, but it was a daft idea.
12. The fusebox has five or six connectors to its underside and they're all different sizes, so are easy to re-fit in the right places - not sure why I took a photo from this side again, though...
13. At this point, I've run the thin loom that goes from one side of the seatbox to the other across - it comes through a hole in the top, left corner here and carries the power to the fusebox as well as some relay wiring.
14. The fusebox in and bolted down along with the relays and a "voltage sensitive switch" which does God knows what. I decided to fit my backup ECU earth wire again, even though it shouldn't need it, but it does no harm.
15. Onto a slightly less cerebral problem - this is the inside of the front of the driver-side wing - where there's no oily mess is where a bracket fits, which holds the radiator in place. Unfortunately, two bolts had to be cut through when I took this apart, as they'd rust-welded themselves into the captive nuts behind this panel and this ultimately meant I couldn't put the radiator back in.
16. After I'd successfully broken every drill bit I owned in the 3-5mm range and resolved to just buy new wings, my girlfriend (who was much less angry than me at this point and, therefore, had a better functioning brain) pointed out that I could probably bend the wing-panel enough to get the plate out from behind it, which held the broken captive nuts - all I had to do was drill out all the rivets and spot-welds.
17. This is the plate from inside the wing - what a b*st*rd it is to get at, let me tell you! If this whole exercise didn't prove the whole "every job is the start of ten other jobs" adage, I don't know what does! As you may be able to tell, I've calmed down considerably since doing this
18. Here's the plate and you can see the problem - it's been designed from the outset to turn to rust and then be impossible to get at -thanks LR...
19. Now I knew what I was doing, I attacked the other wing rather more surgically and had the plate out in under five minutes - all those poor drill-bits gave their lives for nothing
Anyway, I was then able to grind the dead bolts off, tack-weld on new ones and the both plates are away at the galvanisers.
20. What other fun? Oh yes - because the bodywork had all corroded away around the rear fixing bolts, I decided to strengthen it with some aluminium angle - as I have quite poor taste, I used chequer-plate
21. The outer-most holes needed more thought, as not only is the bodywork flat here (so I couldn't just extend the angle-piece), I'd also destroyed the fog-light and the reversing-light getting them off and intended to replace them with cool-looking NAS round replacements. After some thought and marking-up...
22. ...I cut a piece of chequer-plate to fit and bolted it in place...
23. ...drilled a 40mm hole for the NAS light (40mm is too tight - 42mm would have been better)...
24. ...and proceeded to fit the fog-light on the wrong side
25. With the N/S as a template, it was easy to do the O/S the same. After this, I drilled a load of holes for rivets and a couple of bolts, clarted the back of the plates with sikaflex and fixed them in place - job done.
26. In other news, I had to make an exhaust hanger-bracket (the gearbox PTO is in the way of the standard one and I had to cut it off)...
27. I don't know why I took a picture of
this - that's some sh*t welding right there...I'm not usually
this bad
28. I also decided to change the drive-belt tensioner while I had the belt off...
29. ...which came off easily enough, but the replacement needed a thin-walled 14mm socket to fit which I didn't have, so that was a job that ended here.
30. This one photo gives an insight into a job which has taken days and such a quantity of innovative and furious swearing that I may have to scrub the walls of the shed down to get it all out. I managed to pick up a set of vent fly-screens cheap off eBay - hooray...but I'd already fitted the dash etc and after an afternoon of trying to slide them in from the sides and getting one irretrievably jammed, I had to take the instruments, binnacle, air-vents and dash sub-frame back off again to get at it. Then, these fly-screens are from a series or something and they have mounting-tabs that the Td5 bulkhead doesn't have holes for. I didn't want to drill yet more holes in the bulkhead (particularly not around the vents, which enthusiastically rust out with no encouragement from cack-handed drilling), so I decided to stick them in with marine sealant (sikaflex), but this meant lots of complicated clamping to keep them in place while it went off, which was also a pain in the @rse...mutter, grumble, whinge...I asked my girlfriend the other day, "Do you know what really annoys me about Land Rovers?" and she rather astutely suggested, "Everything?" Hmm...
So the next jobs are: put the wings back together, put the dash back together and survey the lay of the land from the vantage-point of square-one again
Cheerio