Darren

Somehow, I don't think my wife would agree...

Ok Mo, here are a couple of pictures of the set-up in my 110. The first shows the steel plate that the Discovery seat is fixed to. The plate is folded up at the rear so that it can be attached to a hinge that is, in turn, bolted to the lip at the rear of the seat box. The bolt visible at the front of the steel plate is screwed down into a captive nut and by removing this, the seat can be tipped backwards. Each seat is supported on two of these steel plates - one under each runner. The runners themselves still work perfectly, although I guess in a 90 you'd be restricted on how far back they could go. As you can see, the drivers side of the seat box has been cut out to give easy access to the storage space (which works surprisingly well) although you'll have to excuse the general untidy state of this area. My 110 is basically somebody else's unfinished project and this is one of the bits that's unfinished I'm not sure how useful the second picture is, but I'm trying to show how much room there is between the seat and the underside of the steering wheel. I'm not exactly slight of build, but there's plenty of room

The previous owner of my 110 has gone to a lot of trouble to fabricate a new dash top rail that incorporates very large aluminium demister vents - almost the full width of the screen - but as they look awful and are not significantly more effective than the standard ones, I'm going to return it to standard. It's also got a heated screen, but that's not actually connected to anything

Maplins do a four door kit for about £22. I plan to fit it to mine as opening all of the doors by hand to strap my two kids in the back is a bit of a chore.

My 110 is fitted with Discovery seats, and very nice they are too. They are each mounted on two flat steel plates that are, in turn, attached to the rear of the seatbox with large hinges and to the front with bolts down into captive nuts. Undo the bolts and the seats hinge backwards to gain access underneath, although the drivers side of the seatbox has also been cut away to make the storage space more easily accessible. At this point I'd usually post some pictures. However, not only is it chucking it down with rain, but my darling wife has pinched my camera. Will try tomorrow...

Could be a slightly loose ABS sensor (the front ones seem most susceptible) or could be a worn wheel bearing. Just had the same on my wifes' DII and it turned out to be a worn rear wheel bearing - the excess play disrupts the way that the ABS sensor takes its' reading from the adjacent toothed disc.

That really is the point. It doesn't affect the overhang at all when it's safely packed away in the back Like many things though, it is a compromise and has a number of pro's and con's. On the plus side, you can use it at both ends of the vehicle, it stays clean and dry when not in use and, most importantly for me, the winch can be left at home for the 99% of the time when I know I won't need it. The downsides are the slightly increased complexity of installation, the slightly more prominent mounting and the fact that the thing needs to be lifted into position. For my purposes, the winch is a complete toy (that I won in a magazine competition, as it happens) and probably won't get a lot of use, so these compromises work in my favour. I appreciate that it won't suit everybody, though. As an aside, the mounting for the front that I envisaged would have had the winch positioned high enough so that the approach angle wouldn't suffer significantly. I fully intended to be able to drive with the winch in place at the front. I had the design for the bracketry all drawn up but never got as far as having it built before selling the Discovery. I'll have to dream up something similar for my 110 now. On top of everything else, it's a nice little engineering challenge too

For the sake of completenesss, this is my winch trial-fitted on its' demountable cradle on the back of my old Discovery. One of the details that I was trying to achieve was to ensure that the rear door would still open with the winch in place, which it did...just! I don't have the Discovery any more, but the winch and cradle are sitting in my garage awaiting some fettling time to marry them up to my 110. Positioning the Anderson connectors was something I hadn't completely solved before I parted with my Discovery. One of the problems is that the cable isn't very flexible, making positioning tricky. I had half a mind to mount the rear one inside the back door but I'll admit it's not desparately elegant. The connectors are reasonably waterproof when fitted with the optional caps and can be made more so by filling the back of them, where the cables enter, with silicon. A better solution, however, is to terminate them inside a waterproof box that has a hinged lid for access. I haven't sourced a suitable box yet, but it's something I plan to look into for my 110. The front of a Discovery is even more tricky, as there's not a lot of 'spare' bodywork to mount things to. I thought I'd eventually end up with a box mounted on the spotlight bar that I had on the front of mine but, as I say, I didn't finish working out the details. Whatever you do, it'll help to make sure that the orientation and positioning of the plug relative to the receiver on each end of the vehicle are similar, so that the fly lead on the winch will reach both easily and can be as short as possible. Other details to consider are the weight of the winch on its' cradle and how it's to be transported. It'll have to be lifted out of the vehicle when you need it so you don't want it too far in from the back door. You also don't want 40-50kg of steel moving about in the back in the event of an accident so it'll need to be secured somehow. Ultimately, I plan to switch to plasma rope on mine for the weight saving on the cable and fairlead!

Really? You learn something new every day. For my purposes, that basically makes the case for a solenoid pack at each end of the vehicle. I'm comfortable with using the three pole Anderson as the advantages of not having the solenoid pack on the winch itself are too good to ignore.

I found that an excellent size compromise on a non-lifted vehicle was 245/75. Taller than standard, so a bit of extra clearance under the diffs, but no so tall as to raise the gearing too much (about 6% as opposed to 10-11% with 235/85). They required no mods to suspension or bump stops and only needed a very small trim of the rear wings to clear on full articulation. I ran these size tyres for over 5 years on my DI (BFG Trac Edges in my case, sadly NLA) with no porblems at all. There are details of the slight arch trimming on my website.

Surely it's the distance from the battery that determines voltage drop? Where the solenoid is positioned along that route shouldn't make and difference, AFAIK. It's the same thing with an Anderson connector - before or after the solenoid won't change the overall resistance (if any). The fact that a three pole connector would be needed after the solenoid is academic, as only two poles of the latter would be in use at any one time. The whole thing might be academic for me though, as I'm seriously considering mounting a set of solenoids at both the front and rear of the vehicle. I'm not sure yet though. I plan to set it up as a rear winch first (because the mouting is easier) and see how it goes.

I'm part way through setting up something similar on mine, although my winch tray is designed to fit a Dixon Bate hitch. One thing I plan to do with mine is mount the solenoids inside the vehicle, partly for their protection and partly to reduce the weight of the demountable bit as much as possible. This obviously means that there needs to be three connections to the winch but, luckily, Anderson actually make a three pole version of their standard plugs. They're tricky to track down, but this company can get them for about £17 each: www.torberry.co.uk/ Eventually, I hope to sort out a wireless remote too, to make it that bit easier to use the winch front and rear.

I'd just like to thank everybody for the information contained both in this thread and the one that Western linked to regarding alternative steering wheels. My original four spoke wheel was shedding black 'stuff' every time the weather turned cold so, with the help of these threads, I sourced a nice leather RRC wheel from ebay and fitted it over Christmas. It's sooo much nicer

Hmm ok, suspicion confirmed then Thanks guys.

The charge light on my 110 is doing strange things and I wondered if anybody could shed any light (ha, ha) on it? When I start it from cold it works as expected, although I have to blip the throttle slightly to make it go out. Once it's warmed up, it glows very faintly - so faintly that it's only really visible at night. The strange thing is though, it only glows when there's no electrical load. As soon as I turn on something such as the side lights, the heater fan, or even put my foot on the brake, it goes out again. I'm not sure that it's desperately relevant, but the engine is an Iveco 2.5TD. It just means that if I do need an alternator then I'm going to have to go hunting for one

Saw this thread linked from another and thought I could add to the mix of ideas. After nearly five years of ownership, my wife and I have just sold our Desert Wolf Lynx off-road camping trailer. Built almost entirely from stainless steel (different grades for different applications), these are seriously strong bits of kit. We took ours all over Norway, on a grand tour of central Europe over the Alps and on numerous less demanding trips in the UK and found it to be an excellent design. More details here. We found camping with a trailer to be a good compromise between the flexibility of living out of the vehicle and the luxury of a 'base camp' that freed the vehicle up for other uses - particularly if you wanted to stay in one place for a few days. The Lynx came with on-board fuel and water tanks (80l and 60l respectively) and a 20l jerry can (useful for transferring fuel), twin 100 amp batteries and a National Luna 80l fridge. It also came with a 50w solar panel but we found that the twin batteries would easily run the fridge for 5 to 6 days and so never really needed it. Suspension was via leaf springs and decent shock absorbers. It was also fitted with longitudinal axle location bars, which meant it wasn't relying on the springs to hold the axle in place. An undriven axle that's pulled over rough terrain tends to want to move backwards and these bars countered that. The axle was rated at 2.5 tonne and the hitch at 3.5 tonnes, although the trailer was only plated to 1750kg gross. In practice, fully loaded it was probably only about 1 tonne (about 650kg empty). Brakes were standard Alko, as was the hitch, albeit a commercial model. Desert Wolf run a hire fleet of these trailers in South Africa and I'm told usually cover around 50000kms before being sold off second hand, so this set-up is proven to be very tough. If building one from scratch, I'd definitely aim to have the axle positioned the same distance from the rear axle of the tow vehicle as the latters' wheelbase, as it really will follow in the same tracks. The track width should, of course, also match. This makes towing both on and off road so much easier. If venturing anywhere vaguely remote, the wheels should be interchangeable with the tow vehicle for maximum flexibility. As far as tents go, Maggiolina are excellent and would be my first choice for a roof tent. However, I think you'll struggle to form a practical ground tent enclosure that would work with it. The tent on my Lynx was make by Desert Wolf, but Howling Moon make an excellent range that incorporate an enclosed ground tent, although at a price! Hope this helps.

Proper 'D' rings are bolted to the chassis via the bumper bolts so there's no danger of lateral loads on the chassis unless rigged in a very strange way (I'd post a picture except the ones I have for mine are in the garage being painted at the moment ). A good bridle is recommended as they're basically only attached with two 10mm bolts each, but it's good practice to use one anyway. The big advantage is that they're above the bumper, so no grovelling around in the mud to reach them when stuck!

How about some good old fashioned 'D' rings mounted on top of the bumper? These use the existing bumper mountings and, if fitted with decent bolts and used with a bridle, Bob's your mothers' brother.

Thanks Jim, that site is excellent - just what I was looking for!

Thanks guys. Potes is a bit far north with a start and finish in Madrid, unfortunately. The driving in Spain tips are very useful, thanks, and any opportunity for a Caine quote is worthwhile Your experience of the Pyrenees is also useful, Chris. I've heard before that 'any track goes' but never been able to find anything official on it. The Spanish do generally tend to be a lot more relaxed than folks in the UK so it does sound plausible though. I could really do with some decent maps to plan a route. I wonder if there's a Spanish equivalent of the OS?

Later next year, probably October half term, I'm planning a trip with three vehicles to central Spain for 4/5 days of camping and off-roading. Crossing will be via Portsmouth-Bilbao, but the start and end point of the camping trip will be Madrid (where my parents live and will be looking after my small children for the duration ). I've done the sea crossing before and driven down through Spain for a trip to Morocco a few years ago, so know what to expect on that score. However, other than a couple of nights under canvas in the Sierra Nevadas on the way back, haven't done any proper travelling in Spain and I wondered if anybody had any pointers? In particular, I'd appreciate recommendations for maps, information about the legalities of off-road driving and knowledge of good areas or routes to aim for in the region.

Absolutely. You couldn't tow with them but they are certianly sturdy enough to stand on. They're bigger too, which helps with that. Basically, though, as they go right out to the edge of the bodywork they provide a degree of protection to the rear lights - like a bumperette, only nicer IMHO When I had them on my Stage 1, they also protected the towing electrics, which can just bee seen in the pic in my first post.

Ha! Forget all I've said about having to drill new holes to fit these things. It's just struck me whilst studying Dunsfolds' parts listing that I must have bought two of the same side all those years ago. Duh

My point was that those on the pink are also the ones found on pretty much every Series LR I've ever seen, or indeed owned. I don't doubt that the ones I'm after are earlier than '86, nor that they're a factory part as Mr Freezer has given me the part number. They're clearly not 'standard' though, and I'm trying to find out what they would have been originally specified for.

Ok, thanks for the extra detail. I really would be interested to know when and where these handles were originally used as I've just had a scan back through my own pictures for the last ten years or so and I can only find one other vehicle with them fitted - the red prototype 90 in the Dunsfold Collection! I can't see that they're anything particularly clever to do with the spare wheel on station wagons, even if the wheel came down that low, which I don't believe it does. This design doesn't move the handle over as such - it just extends it outwards to the end of the crossmember. The 'other' type is clearly easier to manufacture as it's just a pressing rather than parts welded together so I wonder if originally it was for some special purpose? As I said earlier, I actually had to drill new holes to fit them to my Stage 1.