I have trawled around the forums trying to work out exactly what we might need to do to carry on with our project, we have fully rebuilt a 200tdi engine ready to go in (Many thanks to our friends from the series 2 club for the help !) and we have restored the axles and have a rolling chassis now on a black painted Richards series 2 4 cylinder chassis. Obviously knowing more I might have asked Richard to do others things to the chassis but at the time i thought we might still use a series transmission. We have decided to go down the Lt77 and LT230 route for the transmission for many reasons but now I'm stuck deciding where exactly to mount the engine. We inherited a 3.6l ford son major engine with the truck so no original engine mounts to try and i was thinking there may be a benefit to fabricating our own engine mounts which would push the engine a bit further foreword using the standard series chassis mount positions. We would have to move the radiator and cut down the end of the water pump but id prefer to do this that cut bits of the chassis to make the props fit. Not sure if this will cause further potential for 200tdi turbo hitting the chassis rails. I was kid of hoping to stick with the 200tdi manifold and turbo just have a Steve parker exhaust. Is there any scope to slightly lift the engine with custom mounts I wonder. I seem to find a lot of information about SWB solutions and a lot of friends have tried to help us out with ideas but wonder if there are some installations of this in the LWB platform. I assume we will be replacing LT230 brake with a disc so that it can get close to that cross member without cutting it out.
If drawings of the engine mounts or dimensions existed i would mock some up and try mounting the engine in slightly different positions. As for sticks coming up at this point i wont be going to the trouble of restoring the series lever looks right away but we have sourced a part time 4wd kit from a friendly member of the forum. We will use the transfer case from the Disco that the engine come from and a defender lt77 and bell housing. Thanks for much for all the advice so far !
Here are a few picks of our progress not yet a full write up of our many years learning what the hell we are doing !
