Ed Poore

How did you pick them up when you were bent over from paying?

I've got a surplus to requirements (pretty much brand spanking new) heavy duty adjustable one here you can have for nowt Stephen.

One of the benefits of "static" ICE generation is that you can tune the engine for optimal efficiency and you can better capture "waste" energy. For example (my memory is a little hazy so bear with me) my old department at Imperial achieved >90% efficient ICE electricity generation because they used I think it was gas inside (what used to be a) diesel engine. But all the excess heat was captured and used for central heating within the campus and the Royal Albert Hall which accounts for most of the inefficiency of vehicle based systems.

Careful - that cost Toyota a fair few million to fix an issue like that...

It'll just come in somewhere else and then just pool at your feet.

Not true for most lithium based technologies. To be fair the "battery packs" have the electronics to protect themselves and know the characteristics required so they tend to take care of themselves. The problem comes when people DIY the charging solution without fully understanding the intricacies.

I would if there's one that will tow a couple of tonnes for a few hundred miles in a reasonable time and carry on towing off-road in places like this. edited to add: I could probably use an EV for about 50% of the stuff I do (to be honest it would suit it since quite often I have to go out of my way to fill up) but at least 50% of my journeys are towing at least a tonne and a half these days on steep Welsh country lanes. There's only one road out from my place (there's four cross roads within 2 miles so not like I don't have a choice of routes) that's less than a 1 in 3 and that heads nowhere particularly useful before it becomes a 1 in 3 anyway.

I suppose another aspect is when you empty all the reserves in order to get going quite often modern ones can't be towed (may have changed) and you need to get it to a charger rather than just bunging in a couple of litres from whatever container a petrol station has to hand. I reckon half the breakdowns I've seen in the last two years have been people running out of fuel. Perhaps the kind of person but one would assume the mentality will transition to EVs as well and running out of charge.

What would be a major boost to facilitate the change over to EV is standardising the battery packs so you can recharge as quickly as an ICE vehicle. Yes I know it will compromise the design initially but being able to pull into a "petrol" station and have a system to swap out the battery for a fully charged one in the matter of a minute or two would be a major win factor in the eye of the consumer. For example the regular(ish) journeys that @miketomcat and I do to the Highlands and back are bad enough with 2 minutes at a petrol pump to refuel let alone an hour to recharge the battery to continue. It would turn a 13h drive into a slog.

There was an SL35Ti that came up for sale near me for less money than 200Tdis go for...

I think along with @Mo Murphy's issues it's a sign 200Tdis aren't long of this world anymore and everyone should be switching to V8s... (cue questions about when I'm going to get around to fit the 1UZ into the 110...)

Burning off in the pistons?

Why is it whenever you get some new toys I do too? 😂 Two three phase gennies, admittedly the Deutz air cooled one infront is for Dad because it has wheels and his digger probably doesn't have the lift capacity for the Ford one behind. And a considerable present courtesy of @FridgeFreezer. The irony is I'll probably have to use the diesel gennie to charge the electric forklift until I figure out another solution. There's also been an M18 plane and belt sander delivered to accompany the M18 table saw.

Pretty obvious, one 4" OSMUND pipe and a gas pipe...

You laugh, I finally gained access to our second cellar and one of the waste pipes from the downstairs cloakroom runs through the corner of it.

Bunker

You missed a trick with the forklift @FridgeFreezer. Bob mentioned that a mate of his has a similar forklift to the one you sent me - he cut a 10mm road plate and used it as a workbench in the garage because it tucked up neatly. If he needed the forklift he removed the workbench table and used it. Bonus was it was infinitely adjustable in workheight

He has mentioned that in the past - but he's probably been working on it for 30 years.

There are a couple of people on here who have met Bob (@Gazzar springs to mind), he's the friendlies / (semi-) most helpful person you'll ever meet. And there in lies the problem, he's always dropping what he's doing to help the next person - the problem being he never quite finishes helping the first person and never ever gets around to doing his own stuff. When I went to his yard last time the 40ft shipping container which was rammed with transfer cases somehow had managed to squeeze double the amount of stuff inside it. There were two 40fters side-by-side, the plan was to move the now empty one to another spot on the yard and then sort through the transfer case container whilst moving the contents to the new location. I'll keep pestering him but unless I go up there and look for it myself I doubt he'll have the time too - and that's going to involve basically finding all LT230s in his yard and removing the plates to see what gearing they are as he doesn't recall it being labelled up as such

Okay but Sid has a proper transfer box 😆

My 110 did have a good fight with parts of Wales. I think we can say it was a draw, Wales snapped 4 of the 8 bolts holding on the towbar but the 110 did snap a 4ft boulder of Wales in half. Only one of us had to tow the Argocat back to my parents though...

I'd go with the don't bother approach unless you're going to be doing really silly stuff. I mean you're going to be sitting much higher than most Land Rovers are anyway - as long as you don't hit anything at speed then you're unlikely to do any damage. The Southdown guards were 6mm steel but I reckon you could go thinner with some bracing (weld some angle over the top to triangulate it etc). Problem with a belly place is you'd need to be religious about cleaning it out - there's a reason why Land Rover have lots of holes in their chassis (well before they start getting rusty). Dad's Shogun has rotted out and if you look at it the "drain" holes are tiny compared to LR ones and also quite often not in the lowest spot on the chassis . People also seem to have this misconception that aluminium is "lighter" than steel. Yes it's density is lower but if you build the same structure in aluminium as you do in steel then you need substantially thicker aluminium to achieve the same strength, where aluminium allows you to play games is by making lighter structures through clever designs / bracing / triangulation etc.

Well just done a run up the M4 and M5 to collect a boot-full of bits from the annodisers in Birmingham. Filled up in Carmarthen before going and re-filled when I returned, 340 miles of mainly motoway cruising but some heavy traffic in spots, but I was a good boy and stuck to the speed limits, albeit with some lead footedness. The Range Rover indicated 31mpg overall and by my calculations did 29.2mpg so a little variation but then it is running 255/55R20 tyres rather than the standard 255/50R20s which is ~3.3% oversized and the mpg estimate was ~6% over.

I can only speak based on the experience I have from helping out my mate a handful of times. They are bigger groups than a typical laning group (in this instance with "staff" vehicles) we were 12 (10 clients) there's no denying that. Unfortunately this is just down to economics - I quizzed my mate on it a few years back and his break even point is 6 vehicles - if he gets 6 vehicles on a trip then that covers his costs for a single trip (his fuel, accommodation, food and entry to the estates). Bear in mind that entry to estates can vary from a hamper at Christmas to several £100s per vehicle for a single days access. When I've helped out I'm usually at the back of the convoy on the road or at the front (or infront of the least capable / most inexperienced vehicle) on the more challenging tracks. There's a fair amount of road driving involved but I've not usually found the convoy size to be an issue, we're often being held up by other tourists. Once we're on the track it's irrelevant because all of them are private in Scotland so apart from the land owners or estate workers we don't meet anyone in a vehicle. If we do and they don't have permission then they're trespassing as simple as that, we're usually forewarned of any other vehicles on the tracks. My mate has worked hard to secure these permissions (it's taken 20 odd years of going back and forth to Scotland from the South) so he works his socks off to keep them. For example on one estate we met as we came down off the hill a kid on a motocross bike, that was immediately reported to the estate factor and they confirmed he didn't have permission thanked us profusely for doing so. In terms of the group dynamic it largely depends on the clients but in the 20 odd years the number of bad eggs is very small, only a few. He's normally pretty good at weeding out people who want to off-road rather than "see Scotland off the road". Bear in mind there's a hell of a lot of road driving compared to tracks because Scotland is so big, the stuff on the tarmacced roads is often more spectacular and the route chosen tends to be off the beaten path and even more so. Historically the trips were 2 weeks and predominately French, Italians and Swiss. He didn't like taking Brits, Germans or the Dutch because unfortunately they tended to fall into the category of wanting to tear up the country side and off-road. COVID changed that and he had to take on British clients, as such it's a 5 day tour now but you still see a lot of Scotland as well, just with less "touristy" stops (e.g. going on a boat trip around Skye). Honestly the size of the group makes it work as well, everyone has a whale of a time in camp in the evening and there's enough people that no one feels left out. Feel free to ask more questions via PM if you want but I'd best not derail this thread any further... (PS it's definitely worth doing it! Just let me know when because I'd love to see a Series 1 going around).

I think the main belly plate was 3" . They acquired the tractor I think as a job lot and no one had any clue why such stupidly thick armour had been used.