Work commences

October 22nd, 2013 by john Leave a reply »

Obviously, before any harvesting of parts can take place, the first job is to get the car running. Dad and I trailered the car down to the local garage, who are pretty handy with Land Rovers (living where we do, every other person has a Land Rover of some sort). I asked them to give the car a once over and give me an honest opinion of what needed doing to the car as a whole, as impartial eyes are better than rose tinted. Happily they were quite positive and came back with nothing more than the odd gasket here or there.

However, back to the problem at hand, it turns out that the distributor is toast. The rotor arm inside it has too much play and the advancing mechanism also is not up to much either. So I got a new one which is now fitted, Dad and I went down to the garage with the trailer (thanks again Dad) and came back with the car and the start of my scrap metal pile. Here is a short video of it running.

 

V8 sounds good!

This is the first time that it has been run properly up to temperature for quite a while, there is a lot of water in the exhaust. Also, notice how the whole car rocks gently when I rev it. I cannot wait to have this thing finished already, just for the noise alone, although it is going to be quite a lot louder when it is done. I was intending to take the exhaust off and do this video, but the exhaust is rusted together and I couldn’t be bothered to fight with it just for 20 seconds of video.

 

You may notice the date on the video is from the 14th. Yes, I am quite a long way behind, I was hoping to have the suspension and axles ready for when my frame came back, so I could immediately bolt it back on, but as time goes on it is looking less and less likely. I haven’t spoken to Paul for a while, so I really should take some time to go to Tomcat just to check in and if nothing else get some picture of the frame in situ.

 

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Time does indeed fly when you are busy, as I have been over the past few days, busy taking the interior of the discovery out. I have had the support of a veritable fountain of knowledge (and bossiness) on her days off from Montessori. But the car has slowly moved on, from this:

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To this:

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And finally, to this:

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Inside there is suddenly an enormous amount of space… and lots of sharp objects that stab and slice at you as you move around. Most of the interior came out quite easily, all relatively logical, there are plenty of Philips head screws holding everything together. Where it became illogical was the dashboard, it feels like an after thought. Or maybe it was that the dashboard was not set out according to my logic, as the mounting points were not where I would’ve put them (or rather they weren’t where I went looking for them).

Another thing I noticed was that there is an awful lot more interior trim in this Discovery than in my 328i, mostly for two reasons I think, 1) the car is bigger and 2) on the 328i more of the parts were larger moulded pieces that covered larger relative areas than in the Disco. Also a quick tip for you all, wear a dust mask and gloves when removing the interior of the car, as I found behind my instrument cluster a large quantity of cigarette ash and grease (or spit, or something sticky), and beneath every cloth trim piece is a lot of general fust (fungal dust where things get wet) that probably isn’t good for your respiratory system.

Which brings me on to another point, as I removed the interior, I started to find a load of less than perfect metal (eg: the gear sticks) and the odd crack in the body shell. It just goes to show you that you don’t really know what you are driving until you strip it back to bare bones. However, I am not fussed with the state of the body work as I do not need it, so it doesn’t really matter. Anyway, enough preaching. The last piece of the interior in the car is the heater box and blower unit assembly (the large black boxes on the left of the picture).

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I shall remove that once I have drained the coolant. Then it’s on to; the electrics, the steering system, the wipers and mechanism, the cooling system, the pedal box,  removing the body from the chassis, the braking system, the drivetrain, the engine, the suspension, refurbishing everything, re-fitting everything in reverse order.

Boy I’ve got some work to do!

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