Ed Poore

Well I know a few years ago (2020?) I bought a load of aluminium scaffold tubes and clamps for £2k, it's enough to do four 5 lifts on the side of our 12m tall, 20m wide west wall of the house. I suspect you'd have a lot of change for building a carport out of that stuff.

I've vastly improved rear leg room with L322 rear seats. They just about fit in once the seat squabs are squashed a bit. Need a fair bit of fab work though as they need something to latch into. A 6ft tall person can sit in and still has headroom and plenty of leg room because the seats are way deeper than normal Defender seats. I only mounted them temporarily (permanently) without butchering the seat box. If I ever get a roundtuit I'd lower them a couple of inches but as the only things that go on there regularly are a 5 year old and three dogs it's largely irrelevant at the moment. Unfortunately don't have any decent pics of the backseats.

Hmm, any chance of pinging over some dimensions of them? We need to start renovating the flat so they might come in handy...

He only has a 2 foot cube of iridium lying about and he is trying to save some weight!

It's getting a bit tidier now, honest... Figured out why the John Deere ride on I'm selling didn't fire up. Bad wiring (in me), had the lever for the mower deck engaged not disengaged so one of the dozen safeties was active. Just need a new steering rack to arrive for it and I can put the deck on it and deliver it to the people who are buying it. In the meantime it's moved sheds so that's freed up a bunch of space. My trouble is I like being able to work on projects inside because I can and up until yesterday we've had a shocking summer. Just the projects tend to be big so I like having free space inside to bring them inside.

No, jet or pulse jet powered

Sorry it's a bit late @roamingyak but I gave a mate in Guildford my 110's old 300Tdi Salisbury (disc braked) axle when I replaced it with a Wolf axle. He's not far from @Hybrid_From_Hell so perhaps the axle could be acquired, overhauled (and potentially trussed) by our resident diff expert and shipped out?

Once you've made a "proper" adapter can you use that in a sand mould to pour more or do you have to make it slightly oversized to allow for shrinkage?

If only we knew of someone who'd built a lifting roof for a lift...

Got my wee Gaston Dufour mill up and running today off an 11kW static phase converter. Motor sounds happy enough on setting 5 of 8 at least with the spindle and slow traversing going. Try the fast traverse and it's not happy. There's an 28kVA gennie outside which can power it for bigger jobs but at least this means I don't have to fire that up for quick jobs.

I'm assuming you're running MIG at the moment? If so can you flip over to stick? I can quite happily run my inverter TIG (which will do stick) off a 13A socket and burn through a 3.2mm rod at 125Aish which I've found to be plenty for 20mm plate. I am Ving the plate nice and deep though but that's standard practice on something that thick. Those joints have held up quite happily to a few tonnes on them (the headstock attachments for the JCB's pallet forks). More specific to that inverter but it'll run 200A off a 16A breaker which will handle a 4mm rod but I've never had the need to try it.

You're not going to like this answer (because it means more money spending) but yes I do and it's great. Got the M18 Fuel top-handle version, so nice not having a power lead dragging behind you. My only very minor criticism is that the notch / locking system to keep it vertical (you can twist it over up to 45° to do chamfered cuts) could be a bit more precisely made. It's got a lever that unlocks it and then you can either clamp it at any angle or it's got regular notches for positive stops but there's a wee bit of slop in them so you can get it not cutting perfectly at 90° sometimes. It's just a case of slackening it off and whacking it back hard against the stop and clamping back down. Having said that as a rule if I need a precise cut I'd usually try and use a more appropriate tool, I am being really finicky over it. Worth keeping a supply of blades in stock though - I always keep using the same one and then eventually decide to swap one over and think I should have done that a long time ago. It's also pretty damn good at cutting thinner sheet steel with an appropriate blade and so much cleaner than using a grinder. You can adjust the rake of the blade (forwards / backwards slope) which helps a lot on clearing chips out of the way, you won't get a perfect 90° finish at the end if you finish on that but for the bigger sections it's worth kicking the bottom of the blade out so that it makes it easier to throw the chips out. You can always twist it back to vertical to finish the cut. It has also survived a 4m+ fall onto a 40mm thick slate slab. Was using it for some demolition in the old stable block and stood on the floorboard it was on - which was loose so the jigsaw got ejected upwards about a metre before falling down through the hole in the floor onto the slate floor below. Thought - that's it, nope just broke the blade and it's been fine ever since.

Unless you make a huge hole-saw / fly-cutter then you can have a lightweight aluminium flywheel. I know it's a fair wad of cash but if you pilot drilled it and then cut out the centre with a jigsaw and the same with the corners at least you haven't "wasted" it and I'm sure a man of your talents would find a use for the offcuts. The Milwaukee jigsaw blades I've found to be bloody good at cutting aluminium although not tried on that thickness but perhaps flooding with some coolant would help clear the chips.

To be fair I think the single biggest reason discs are preferable is the lower maintenance overhead as they are self adjusting. Particularly important if you're the one doing the maintenance. One point not brought up is that drums are effectively self applying, once applied they effectively lock themselves on with minimal effort. However that can also mean that you get slightly less feedback from the brakes. Whether that difference is noticeable is dependent on a lot of factors. When I adjusted the Sandringham's drum brakes properly it stopped a damn sight faster and with lower effort (from me) than I ever could in the disc braked Defender. As if to prove a point though it failed the initial MOT on braking effort because I'd forgotten to adjust them it has been so long since I'd had a drum braked vehicle. Adjusted the tester came back from the test drive rubbing his head with a big red spot on it where he'd whacked his head against the windscreen.

Well a decent flywheel and crankshaft for it to sit in would be nicely balanced. Find a Timken bearing for it to sit inside and then use the starter gear to turn the main flywheel. Hell if you wanted I've got a wee 24V geared motor with an encoder on it that would position the starter gear to within <0.1° . Hell I've even got an overkill driver board for it I made yesterday ready to populate for another job. Could etch another circuit board in half an hour if you wanted - although this one is for a 1HP 180VDC 3000RPM motor (but drives my little geared motor quite happily). Can handle up to 380V off a single phase supply. rough A#se my a#se - I seem to recall @Daan commenting I, at least drove, with some grace squeezing the 110 down through those tracks at Seven Sisters . But yes I can be a rough a#se sometimes.

Just need a bigger flywheel and a starter motor gear to suit... Simple shaft for it to sit on and job done

Window at the front and window at the back

True, didn't think of that. Unless it's made into a big cross shape or with a big flat bar that bits into the ali either side... I'm with Ross in that that countersunk looks like it'll pull through fairly easily.

Do you need those ones to be bolts or can you use something like wheel studs which are a press fit into the ali?

I guess your kind of ballscrew is made up of huge steel wheels rather than tiddly ball bearings.

With your capabilities I'd be inclined to knock together a bit of a support structure, even if it's just in wood onto a pallet to hold everything steady. Prior to dumping mine into a donor mockup chassis I had it on a pallet on some cheap heavy duty castors from ebay. Had blocks of wood wedged under relevant bits and big ratchet strap over it. Never fired it up as I hadn't sorted the fuel system but had it cranking over to test the ECU. Looked a lot more stable than @Bowie69s setup there.

You genuinely surprise me that you hadn't heard of them!

That just isn't true...

Do you do building work Stephen? I could really do with you operating at this speed on some of my projects...

LR cheapskate / broke (Underneath the Land Rover)