Ed Poore

Don't know ATB side of things, Nige is probably best to weigh in but on the locker front he convinced me that swapping axles was a better choice. The main strength of the Salisbury diff is in the cross pin which you throw away with any conversion, ergo you don't have the main benefit anymore. The casing may be a bit stronger but is also a lot bigger and plough like. Then it came down to (for me) the locker and the various options were either rocking horse poo availability, had design faults, spares issues, or just downright expensive. The Ashcroft offering at the time hadn't been broken, was readily available and not too bad on price. My suspicion is that any ATB Salisbury component / diff is likely to have the same issues. So unless you're really wedded to keeping the axle a Salisbury then there are likely better and more cost effective options (based off very little research for ATBs).

They do just bolt up but if you transfer calipers from the Salisbury (as I did) then the discs themselves are different (SDB100980L I think is the part number). The Td5 / Tdci axle have the same bolt pattern for the calipers but they've got a slightly different offset on the axles which mean the standard Salisbury disc clashes with the caliper. So in summary swap the axle, change discs, change prop I can't remember what length is required or a part number, I simply phoned Gwyn (Gwyn Lewis 4x4) and told him what I'd done and he bunged the correct length prop in the post for me.

If you wanted an ATB in yours then it's probably easier to source a second hand axle off a Td5 or Tdci Defender which has the short nose diff in it then you can drop an Ashcroft ATB in there. I picked up an axle casing complete with hubs and discs for £100 and Nige (@Hybrid_from_Hell) sourced a donor diff for me and then built it up (although I went pegged Ashlocker rather than ATB). Probably worth pricing up the different options, I suspect using a new axle wouldn't be that expensive compared to finding an ATB for the Salisbury.

They did have the plys on the side wall but in plain black slightly raised lettering so it was on the tyres but not obvious to say the least.

It may be more than just local variables and driving style. My father and I have always been a fan of the BFGs because we've never had less than 60k out of a set - and that 60k I got out of KM2s were slashed to kingdom come from off-road and had worn down the tread significantly (OK I'll admit I've they've still got ~8mm of tread of them)... However when I got a new set and was at the local tyre place swapping them over we noticed that they'd quietly reduced the ply rating on the sidewalls. The first set I had must have been some of the very first KM2s in the country (they were of that age) and I got some of the last KM2s before the KM3s came out and they'd dropped from 10 to 8 ply on the sidewalls. So not every tyre is made equal shall we say...

Too much effort I suspect. Let's say it had a friendly MOT when I bought it so I'm not going to go out of my way to get it road legal again. The fuel tank is currently held up by a ratchet strap . It was a quick purchase to use as a runaround after I snapped the 2nd crank on the Defender. Although one the body has been cut in half it'll be easier to examine the state of things . Probably do minimal changes so that I feel so inclined it could be registered. Forgot about front driven off the crank, might look into that. Can ditch the air con radiators etc - hmm could be reused on the Defender

Right mad hat on. I may have just (yesterday evening) been offered a cherry picker (either free of charge or in exchange for helping with some electronic issues ). It is currently sat on a Defender / Range Rover / Series / Mazda hybrid (Defender gear train, RR chassis, Series body and Mazda power plant). As the bushes etc are worn its not worth the hassle of redoing it when there's another bigger cherry picker waiting to go on a bigger truck. So it's of no use to my mate but will be very handy around my new house (reaching first floor windows for example because a double ladder struggles, and there's another floor above that...). Now as the base vehicle is Ag / Forestry registered that's staying and being converted to a tipper. But I can take the vehicle back home to Wales, figure out plumbing etc and remove the cherry picker. It's pretty self contained (built in oil tank etc apart from the pump itself) and will just unbolt from the chassis and almost lift itself off with the feet. So onto the mad phase of the project, you may also remember I was offered a Sandringham 6x6 which is a perfect vehicle for this but its likely to be months if not years before the probate on that is sorted out. So muggins here realises he has a P38 with a 4.6 V8 which is not roadworthy anymore. I think you can see where this is going... So thoughts are, strip down the P38 to a pickup / flatbed setup (probably reuse or sell on some bits - with any luck I can actually recover a chunk of the £800 I spent on it but that's secondary) and drop on the cherry picker. Simples. Yes it would be simpler to get a pickup / flat bed to do this but where's the fun in that?! The P38 is effectively free in my eyes so why shouldn't I, there's no need for this to be road legal although there might be an option to Ag register it at my parents farm if we wanted to use it at the two places since they're only 4 miles apart. Immediate problem I see is driving the pump since as far as I know theres no easy way to get a PTO off the Borg Warner transfer case. I think the quickest solution would be a seperate small engine to drive the pump, if it's diesel then at least it can be run on red from the farm. Or I could put some form of splitter in the drive train at a later date. Unless anyone here has some bright ideas on running a decent size hydraulic pump off the P38 drive train. There does happen to be another scrap car with a 1l engine at my place so perhaps... But that's a dinky petrol so who knows. For the purposes of this project it shall be kept as cheap and cheerful as possible but my time is of course free. Anyway picture of the cherry picker And why it's going to be useful, even for cleaning windows @V8 Freak it means I might even be able to finish trimming the main drive to save your shiny panels

It's not the physical installation that's the problem - that could be easily standardised. Anything that's accessible by the driver has to conform with all sorts of legislation, the head units that are installed by manufacturers undergo years and years of testing which is why they're typically so far behind the curve of modern tablets. Things are different for the actual manufacturers compared to after market modifications. Land Rover will have to seek type approval and record all the testing that's been undertaken in order to take something to market, if you modify something else after the event then it's not their problem. Look at the hoops that JLR jumped through to create the V8 Works or whatever it was called - they had to get a subsidiary company to do all the work for them because if it was actually JLR that had built them then either they'd be non-road legal or they'd have to be type-approved, something they couldn't do for such a small number.

That's basically what Android Auto is doing - the problem is for a manufacturer to offer an in-vehicle mount for a tablet that's accessible to the driver is opening up a world of pain safety wise.

With regards to the touchscreen I think the main reason everyone has jumped on the bandwagon is it's flexible and allows cheap and easy (for the manufacturer) updates to refresh a vehicle's interior. Historically I seem to remember a lot more "refreshes" of a vehicle's design which were largely focused around the dashboard with some exterior changes as well so you could identify the differences. Nowaways I feel much less changes but the infotainment systems get updated to add more features which kind of has the same effect. I did like my "old" TDV8 (christ that would be12 years old now) which had the touch screen but for switching between screens (maps, phone, music, etc) there were hard buttons surrounding it. That meant I didn't often use the touch screen aspects of it while driving and I could just by feel switch the display if I wanted to check something. Perhaps what they should do is use some of these little buttons with OLEDs in them so that you can have reconfigurable tactile buttons on the dashboard.

Because he's too busy the rest of the time goosing stuff to post about.

I put Loctite on but then I don't have a problem getting the bolt off...

So what about all this horsepower. Don't you all know torque gets you there, power keeps you there. I'll admit torque and power are typically related but I'll be honest the biggest benefit of the TDV8 when I owned it was the bottom end torque rather than the top end power. But more of both is definitely better.

I think @Challo hit it on the head there. For me I drive a 110 because it's simply the best all round vehicle. I don't need a Defender but it does suit my lifestyle very well. For the utility companies / agricultural markets simply put there are more focussed better vehicles for the job nowadays. Quite a few years ago now I looked into a more comfortable car to have alongside the 110 but decided I didn't need (or really have the space) to have two cars. So ironically ended up buying a 3.6TDV8 L322. As Clarkson said "it's all the car you could ever need". The downside for me was tyres. I do enjoy green laning and also go offroad up at the family estate in Scotland. @Retroanaconda remembers me blowing up, literally, (he heard it from inside his 90 behind me) a tyre on the Range Rover. I ended up going through £3.5k of tyres in 3 years... I ended up selling the RR and keeping the Defender because I felt comfier abusing it a bit more and the tyres stood up to what I do regularly better. There aren't many vehicles that will be a daily driver and then in the middle of the day drive across Scottish mountainsides to collect a deer carcass, or through a Welsh farm to collect firewood / sheep in trouble. My Defender does and I suspect the new one will. It'll just be more comfortable than the original version. So all round yes, just weighted more to the daily driver aspect. I mean most of the local farms around me actually use Clios, Kias, Fiestas, small Audis etc. They have quads, tractors and lorries for the actual farm work. Even hauling stuff to market they typically hook up the tractor to the trailer. At least that way our neighbour can take more than two cows in the back without worrying about being overweight. Incidentally most of the utility companies around here still have Defenders in their fleet. When my parents incoming main was being put underground I had a chat with them. All the Defenders run a huge hydraulic winch on the front, not for recovery but for installing cables. Because a lot of their work is in fields they need its off road ability (all the pickups get stuck) and then they use the winch for pulling cables through ditches. If they get stuck it's quicker to ask the farmer for a tow than bother winching out. I'd be curious to see if they get any of the new ones, there's a chap down the road who still has one of the Td5 based vehicles so obviously keeping hold of them.