Hi Sandy,
thanks for your help - I'm slowly finding that half the weight of my Defender must be bolts!
For anybody interested, here's the story so far;
...from the top left, then;
1) One of my neighbours has kindly given up one of his barns to the cause, so after a great deal of sweeping, here's my new after-work and weekend home...
2) The new chassis waiting patiently...
3) I started by taking the doors off...
4) ...and the rear door - glad I've not got a CSW!
5) Getting the roof off started with a chain-winch secured to the barn roof...
6) A bit of persuasion with a jack dislodged the seal above the windscreen...
7) Here's the roof perilously hanging loose...
8 ) ...and I just drove the Defender out from under it - job done
9) I can't be the only person to think "hey, that looks cool!" with no roof in it - the first time it rains, though, I expect it's not so cool...
10) Piper5 then pointed out that I was starting at the wrong end, so I took the bonnet off...
11) ...took the lights etc out...
12) ...and started removing all the gubbins under the N/S wing
13) This is where it started getting awkward - the washer bottle is held on with three bolts that go through the inner wing - all of then had rusted solid, so all of them had to be angle-ground off
14) The washer-bottle won't go past the suspension top cover, so that had to come off - to get at the screws, I had to take out all the turbo inlet pipework...
15) ...finally got the washer bottle out...
16) I decided to cover the turbo inlet, as it was obviously only a matter of time before I dropped something in it!
17) The next thing off was the wing-arch, which was a b@st@rd, as the plastic clips are VERY secure (I don't know why they didn't just build the whole vehicle using these!)
18) I might be a bit out of sequence here, but I took out the heater, which wasn't a difficult job...
19) ...plus the ducting under the wing - it need quite an enthusiastic bit of "manoeuvring" to get it out...
20) There are various philips-head screws that fix the inner wing to the chassis - all of the were rusted solid, so they all needed cutting off...
21) Inside the wing are the 4 bolts that fix it to the bulkhead - these were remarkably easy to get out, surprisingly!
22) The real b@st@rds are the two bolts at the bottom of the wings at the front - it took a whole evening just to get these out!
I'm still trying to release the wings - the bolts at the bottom/front secure them to a bracket that also holds the front panel - I can't see how it's fixed to the chassis, though, so I'm next going to remove the radiator and intercooler to get more room to see what's going on. There's definitely two bolts at the top of the wings at the front into the centre panel, which are very difficult to get at and two half way up the wings at the front into the middle panel, which are nigh-on impossible to get at, because of the grill fixing lugs.
I'm probably going to remove the N/S wing on its own, but may remove the O/S wing complete with the front panel, depending on if I can figure out how it's fixed to the chassis. Removing the radiator means removing the fan, so I'm stuck until the "special" viscous coupling spanner turns up from eBay...
Things I'm using that are making this job less of a PITA than it could be - a Makita impact driver, a box of latex gloves and a set of "face-driving" sockets...
Tune in later for more of the same