Ed Poore

All fair points, sometimes I forget being in rural West Wales and in a farming community having a farm gets you a lot of leeway. Sometimes a grinder is the most effective. I had some 20" OD (20mm wall thickness) pipe to cut up for an acquaintance. Tried my plasma which was supposed to be able to handle 20mm (an ambitious target mind), had plenty of power with 3ph 400A per phase in the lab and air was supplied by the Defender. Wouldn't touch it - tried drilling a hole through it to act as a pilot hole - knocked the rust off and that was it and simply blunted the bit. In the end 9" grinder and some DIY rollers made light work of it. It was something special being a 3m offcut from an oil well in Kenya. Think it was 20% chrome - so despite surface rust the thing was worse than stainless steel.

Is that because of being able to obtain it or the expense? My local tractor factors do a rental free one (SGS I think), as do Hobbyweld I think. Haven't looked into their prices recently but I know acetylene was getting damn expensive.

Don't you have an oxy setup?

I find I tend to snap them first. They're incredibly hard but consequently quite brittle and have a tendency to snap when breaking through as they grab. The amount of time they save I'm happy with the odd breakage.

Not so much toys for me but a tool I made for the builders. We've got (on this window) two 4.5m long, 12x6" timber lintels that need replacing, unfortunately previous owners of our house basically bodged and patched things which meant some rather substantial oak lintels got damp and thus need replacing. So after propping up the wall above with a plethora of acrows and strongboys the builders cut out the old lintel with a chainsaw near the wall but still had the two ends to dig out. I proposed a faster solution and rummaging in my scrap pile found a perfect I beam that I cut 4" off the end of it and cut in half. Some drilling of holes later, love these Dewalt Extreme 2 drill bits*, and pinching a couple of shackles off the Defender resulted in two plates that could be screwed in to the two remaining bits of lintel with 6 foot long wood turbo wood screws (8mm hex head on them) each. Little ratchet winch between them and voila out popped on end. Relocated the bracket to the lintel left in-place and out popped the other, builders loved them as it made it so easy. I suspect the outer ones are going to need winching from the JCB as we don't have anything timber left to fix to (replacing with 4.2m precast concrete lintels - biggest you can get off-the-shelf). * Self piloting up to 13mm and no need for preliminary holes. They like going fast too - make drilling holes in steel so much faster.

Lorry fitter local to you? Probably get a torn side off a curtain sider or something similar. Local trailer place has a huge tarpaulin covering their spare press-brake awaiting me to fix it - that came off one of those car supermarket places, a massive marquee canvas. Apparently they've used about half of it and the left over bit still weighs in at >3 tonnes...

I reckon aluminum or rhino hide

No but I have seen one of the Nemesises (or whatever the plural is) stuck with all four wheels bogged to the top in sand. They activated the jack, lifted the vehicle out. Shovelled sand back in the holes and put a waffle board under the two rear ones and drove off. Think they'd even tied them to the back of the truck so they didn't have to stop to collect them until they were clear of the soft sand. No idea if they stayed attached with 500hp under the bonnet.

This?

That looks like a 4ft version? There is a 5ft version of it. If an extra foot would work.

@mickeyw they're not the cheapest but the Classic Car LED headlights are really good, they also do a more yellow tinted version for the classic look. @darthdicky fitted a set to his truck. You only notice they're LED if you look closely at the bulb, not in your face LED like the trucklights etc.

Won't work now he's widened the track and put it on portals he's going to have to widen and raise the tracked one as well as Sid's just going to drive right over it.

Nige will build exactly what you want. He's a very reasonable man at discussing options. My only gripe is I had the super-duper all singing all dancing options top of the line specced partly because I could afford it at the time. Then about two months after he built my second diff he comes up with an even better spec . Not had any issues with what he's built in the slightest whereas I have got friends who've had issues with stuff built by Ashcrofts directly. My understanding was that they were directing people towards Nige anyway to build centres into diffs (may have changed) and perhaps more for the extreme builds rather than run of the mill. Regardless I'd speak to Nige always even if it is a standard run of the mill build, you'll know its been built to a phenomenal standard then.

Only one wire needed surely to the stop solenoid. Can always bump start it...

They may be more versatile but based off all the work I've done on vehicles I'd still take a 4 poster for the convenience of driving on, doing the work and driving off without the faff of having to align everything and get out to move arms etc. With wheels free and two jacking beams you almost get the versatility of a two poster and you have two nice big shelves. Now just need the scaffolding to move from the front of the house so I can get a concrete lorry in to pour the slab for the four poster.

I would tend to agree with @landroversforever that it's the concrete at fault not the lift. The vehicle is stationary up there for quite a while before toppling over. If it was unbalanced I'd expect it to have gone straight away or whilst lifting. The fact that the concrete has been torn out implies to me that the vehicle was not unbalanced because it stayed on the lift quite happily until the foundations gave way underneath it. Personally I'd have expected the hold down bolts to go at least as deep as a mesh of rebar so that any cantilever like load then has to pull out the mesh which spreads it out over a far greater area. Even better would be a plate under the mesh embedded in the concrete with the bolts poking through the mesh - that way you have to pull the plate through the mesh.

Adding to Ralph's reply electricity jumps roughly 1mm per 1kV in dry air. However add a little bit of humidity into the mix and that distance drops dramatically. I can't remember where I've learnt it but the general rule of thumb was to provide the bare minimum of safe isolation it was 1cm per kV. With a track spacing of circa 1.5m your third rail will be at 75cm separation. Now imagine someone stepping in between with a steel toe capped boot or the like and suddenly you're within possible arcing range. Once you've ionised the air once things become easier again. Ironically imagine the situation with wet leaves in Britain... We have enough trouble with tracks bending in the heat let alone trying to maintain an electrical conductor at the same time...

That advert doesn't inspire me with confidence. A switch (in most use cases) will have a voltage and current rating. Doubling the voltage doesn't halve the current rating... Very unusual to have what is effectively a power rating. Different currents for AC and DC yes but two different DC voltages

I think you need a pit... To drive Sid into.

The moment you take them out you'll break one though.

Another point might be that with the increased use of momentum you are possibly more likely to do damage to components. Of course it's down to the driver that once they have traction aids such as lockers that they don't also use extra momentum to get stuck even further. Basically they allow you to overcome the same obstacles in a much more controlled manner. I actually use the lockers quite a lot on lanes, partly because I spent quite a bit of money installing them, but I also find that it provides a much more pleasant ride. Some people I've been out with like seeing how far they can get without resorting to engaging lockers (i.e. using a more standard vehicle), I take (perhaps slightly a perverse) pleasure in seeing how slowly I can creep through an obstacle. In the summer we joined a friend to help him out guiding a trip in the Highlands, the last track has a potentially* quite dangerous hill climb on it if things go wrong - you can easily bypass it and some do but the vast majority use it as an opportunity to learn. I suspect for the vast majority of people on this forum it would be a non-event but given the majority of these people haven't been "off-road" with their vehicles it's an eye opener. It's only about 100ft but a 60%+ slope (>31°) on a loose surface. The only two crucial bits are ensuring sufficient momentum to get up and making sure you turn left at the top because otherwise you suddenly drop onto a nice 45° side-slope you can't see until your front wheels are on it. On this summer's trip I sat in the vehicle for almost everyone to offer advice if they needed and we practiced good failed hill-climb descents on the start of the slope before they tackled the full climb. Anyway those who wanted a go had a go, then they all wanted me to drive up. There's a video somewhere of one of the group shouting "he's not going fast enough!" as I set off in low second just above a tick-over (but with all three lockers engaged and the anti-roll bar disengaged). The friend in charge of the trip just replied "he knows what he's doing". Well it was a rather uneventful pottering climb up with very minimal wheel slipping, oh so satisfying! One of the clients at the end of the track commented about how uneventful and simple my 110 made things look compared to everyone else (mixture of modern pick-ups, Land Cruisers, Defenders etc). That was a very welcome comment. * they have had rolls on it down, largely, to inexperience when someone fails the hill-climb and loses control on the way back down.

Well I guess see how next year pans out but is it perhaps on the cards to consider having an earlier in the season one and an August one if that holds out?

Not something I've experienced in the slightest. I'm assuming when you mean bad conditions on the road then it's down to ice and snow? I wouldn't ever think of engaging them at "high speeds" say above 20mph so suddenly coming across different traction conditions is largely moot. In the recent icy conditions we had down here (whilst the rest of the country had some snow before Christmas we just got the roads turning to sheet ice where they hadn't been gritted) I still had to go out and about with a trailer (fetching bales of hay for animals etc). If conditions were that bad I'd quite often drop down to low range and lock the centre diff to counteract slightly what you describe. I'm not overly concerned about running that diff locked on the road because you can feel the steering get very heavy to the point of not wanting to turn but at that point you can disengage it because you know you have decent traction. If I came across, for example, on of the bigger hills with ice on then on the straight bits I'd engage the rear locker before setting off. You can feel things beginning to get heavy and struggle to steer quite readily I find so it's easy enough to quickly unlock the diff, make the turn and re-engage if it's a sharp one. If you're on slipper surfaces then it's irrelevant because the wheel just slips. Contrary to your comment I find it far more predictable driving in those conditions because you know the wheels are all locked together. When you're going downhill then potentially you might induce a skid because of a wheel having to skid to go around a corner but then the flip side (and a bigger benefit in my experience) is keeping all the wheels locked together so you have greater traction overall so the risk of a slide is less overall. It's really just getting used to the way the vehicle responds in any situation. I've personally not had any experience of LSDs in a Defender, the Range Rover has them but then it also has a very capable traction control system so you're isolated somewhat (still doesn't get you out of trouble as I found recently). Of the two systems I prefer the Defender setup mainly, I suspect, because I learnt to drive off road and have the experience and like being in control. Another factor may be tyres, I'm running mud terrains all the time so I know that they tend to break traction before breaking something driveline related. Whether that'd be the case with standard components (running Ashcroft HD all around) I don't know.

Did you read the first post? I'd say as load lugger then standard open diffs would be fine as after all pretty much all Land Rovers are capable of 7t+ GTW in standard form. Then the latter answers whether it's on-road or off road.

That to me screams adding a locker. People say LSD etc., but I like the preemptive nature of being able to engage it before needing to. All other kinds are reactive, i.e. something has to happen before they respond. People make a big song and dance about upgrading everything else like half shafts and CVs at the same time but in reality are they needed? I did because they needed doing and I could comfortably afford to at the time but rather ironically it meant my weakest link then became the crankshaft because the only thing I've damaged since the upgrades was snapping two cranks . Sympathetic driving will do more for saving components than anything else, after all the standard ones have got a lot of people around a lot of the world in a whole host of setups. What lockers do allow is more control over being sympathetic to the drive train as you can lock them all and not have to spin wheels and shock load components in order to find traction. If you're spinning wheels with all four wheels locked either you don't have traction or your driving can improve. Of course adding lockers might necessitate extra expense such as compressors and changing other components but that's down to the individual vehicle's wear, tear and setup. My initial air setup cost under £100 because I sourced a second hand air con pump and bracket, most of the expense came from pipework. Cheaper upgrades are certainly possible but none will be as profound I feel.