Snagger

It's a good idea to leave the seal out to allow lubrication of the shaft and drive flange splines - it makes them last many times longer than if the seal is included. Just make sure you fit the plastic cover on the outside of the flange with a bead of RTV sealant.

The flange may have a small variation in thickness which could upset the position of the nut on the pinion threads, but make alignment marks before you undo the nut anyway, and then measure the depths of the flanges as best you can for comparison. I doubt there will be much difference. The collapsible tube is sodding tough and merely holds the inner races of the bearings apart against the pressure of the nut, with the nut position setting the bearing preload. If you replace the flange (and seal if required), then doing the nut up afterwards with a standard ratchet will not apply anywhere near enough torque to further crush the spacer - even with a breaker bar it takes a hell of an effort (just did one the other day). Just do the nut up as tight as you can with the 1/2" ratchet and it'll be fine.

A very smart idea.

Try to think of DC electrics in plumbing terms. The voltage is akin to the pressure and the current is like the flow rate through the pipes. It's not a 100% accurate analogy, but it works well enough. In this case, imagine you have a shower to connect up. It makes no difference to the shower whether the header tanks in the loft carry 10 gallons or 100 - it is only the pressure caused by the height of the tanks above the shower that affects the pressure. In the same way, the capacity of a battery will not affect the performance of the starter motor as long as the voltage is correct. The only difference is that a small capacity tank, or battery, will deplete faster.

Excellent - a nice cheap fix that worked properly!

You might have had a timing fault on the 19J - they should be smoother and quieter than a 200 Tdi because of the indirect injection, and a timing fault would also hamper performance. They have higher fuel consumption and less performance than the Tdi, though, and aren't anywhere near as robust.

As above - silicone will be a real nuisance. A bead of Dumdum would be ideal. Make sure the aluminium of the tub is well painted before fitting the new caping to prevent it touching the steel - it'll help keep the corrosion that so badly afflicts the 300Tdi and TD5 vehicles at bay.

They are just an accessory that replaces a cosmetic trim panel, so removing them returns the vehicle closer to standard. They are though, if fitted correctly, structural in as much as they will support the vehicle, but won't cause an MoT problem if they are damaged or corroded.

None of them are right, though grey would be closest.

The soft dash Classic is still viewed by many, including most senior LR engineers and managers of the time, to be the best RR ever. If it's financially viable, then restoring this will be very rewarding if you plan to keep it, though you wouldn't get your money back on it just yet. Soft dashes aren't that common, though, and their values are slowly rising, as are most Classics in good order; LR are selling CSK number 1 for £65k and I've seen a few standard but top condition Classics for around £15-18k recently! The advice of checking the body shell for rot before spending money is wise. Most is available or can be fabricated, but you need to know how much cost you're getting into. I know of a Classic with EAS that is slowly decomposing in Luton. It might have some of the parts you need. I don't know the owners or anyone who lives on that road, but it's on Stockingstone Road.

I used 88" rear spring plates to move the dampers forward, close to the axle case - since the swivel mounting flange is now well outboard of the dampers, you can afford to move the dampers forward like this for track rod clearance. As it happens, their aft end droops less than the 109 version, so my ground clearance is ever so slightly better too. Everything is clear of everything else, even at full lock.

Well, the box is back together, but I'm buggered if I'm putting it back into the car in this weather!

The Ackerman bit is pretty much what I was saying - I need a tight turning circle, and the Ackeman not only helps that but also reduces wear and tear while doing it. And like I said, the steering arms need to be divergent ahead of the axle or convergent behind, so fitting a track rod ahead of the axle was not going to work well for me. I take your point about the spring plates. Every solution is a compromise, though, and there was no way for me to fit the new axle with slimmer saddles without both notching the axle case for the right spring to sit into the neck of the diff housing and fitting that frontal track rod with the associated issues that would cause. To that end, the compromise of having the spring plates about 1/2" lower than with the previous axles, which was higher anyway than with standard springs, is not a bad one. Considering that it's really for roads and tracks, not heavy off-roading or rock crawling, it won't affect me much. By trimming off the excess of the U-bolts to minimise the protrusion, you can help reduce the problem, and you could fit some sort of profile to the front edge to try to stop it digging, if you find it causes trouble in your use of the vehicle, though they'll never be as low resistance as radius arms. But without a coil conversion, I can't get rid of the plates, so it's an issue that will have to stay. Thankfully, it hasn't had any effect on me anyway.

Trouble with that, Bill, is that I have as much faith in the Big Sky Fairy as I do in the possibility of LR owners being fully satisfied in their vehicles and having no work to do on them! Both are fantasy!

I'll be coming down there for a week in October with the family, Grem. Get the sprinklers on in September, will you?

Makes sense. I'm not sure how much of the gap between prop ad mount is closing up from spring compression and how much from wrap, though both will be a factor. I ask because every time I make a mod now, it has knock-on consequences to do with other mods. You can make a few changes, it seems, without too much difficulty, but you can get to a point where is becomes a cascade of side effects, and while I can't see any negatives from fitting anti-wrap control if kept away from the steering components, it doesn't mean that there won't be new issues. I would think that the new axle has less wrap than the original purely because of that third leaf being added at the same time. I'll see if I can rig up a camera like yo suggest.

It's like the line in Lethal Weapon: "Hate him back. Works for me."

I get the analogy - it's like a pedal cycle: while in theory, the cyclist can only apply so much torque on the crank shaft and front sprocket (input pinion), the reality is that a lower total gearing results in rapid enough acceleration that the cyclist can't keep up with the torque demand, so the forces in the crank and front sprocket are not the cyclist's maximum. It's on the velodrome cycles with the fixed high gear and painfully slow acceleration where the cyclist's maximum force is transmitted through the crank, sprocket and chain because the wheel can't keep up, so those parts get a hammering and chains often snap. It'll be a shame to lose the quieter cruise and 10% fuel saving, but what's the point in that if I keep blowing transmissions - that's more costly than 10% more fuel and a damned sight more inconvenient! It'd be nice to know if the 4.1s would work, but it seems risky. Yet again, though, it's a mod that lots of people run successfully but causes me trouble, even though the vehicle gets good maintenance and is driven sympathetically. God hates me!

Yeah - £1500 in the mid 90s, so about £2200 by current value, for a pile of scrap; it also had bent valves, an incorrectly assembled oil pump that produced almost no pressure. I rebuilt it myself a couple of years later, once all the problems had showed up and it needed a rebore and new pistons already too, probably because of the bent crank (that was only found on strip down). It ran beautifully after that, though - started instantly even afyer weeks of standing in sub zero conditions and pulled my 109 along on the flat at a little over 60mph, despite all the drag from the accessories, and never used a drop of oil or water. That's why I always tell people to build their own, not to buy recon - I had two recon gear boxes with similar quality issues, and replaced the later one with a Gen Parts factory recon which failed after just 30-odd thousand miles (3rd/4th synchro spring failure, jamming the hub unit), which showed numerous thrust washers fitted the wrong way around and a few shims and thrust components fitted in the wrong sequence, wrecking the second gear wheel and no use of the bearing seating compound on the main shaft bearing - not even LR assemble them right! If didn't have such bad luck, I'd have no luck at all!

I think some Japanese vehicles still use leaf springs too, at least on the back end. Like I said, it was an interesting book for the first half - the different manufacturer systems were quite clever, from live beam axles to independent suspension, with a curious middle ground of a scissor-like axle pivoting in its centre. A few of the mods in the second half were OK, but some were clearly risky - leaf springs with so much camber they were literally semi-circular (you can imagine how stiff they'd be, and how much aft movement of axle you'd get as the springs compress; the bushes would last no time at all and the shackles had to be over a foot long, which was highly unstable), but combined with a SOA conversion with 8" or more of raising blocks between the axle and spring and U-bolts 2' in length, and you get the general idea. Plenty of heim joints in steering components, and drag links with 45 degree bends set at 30 degrees or so to the axle. All that good stuff! I know what you and Bill mean about Heim wear - the longitudinal link between the base of the selector lever and shaft on a Roverdrive uses Heim joints, and while they take very little force, over the space of a year they became loose enough that the flange of the joint rotates on the ball easily enough to rattle against the arm of the lever pivot to which the ball is bolted. They're free of slop for actuation, so the fix was an o-ring between the arm and flange, around the outside of the pivot ball, just to sop the rattle. I wouldn't want to use them on critical parts, but figured that anti-wrap bars would be non-critical, providing an advantage but not of great consequence if they wore a bit. Of course, if one failed outright, it could rather ruin your day being so close to the steering system... Serious question, guys: am I just making my life more difficult by worrying about this? You don't hear of many front two leaf parabolics failing (not the good brands, anyway) unless used hard on triallers, so with the three leafs I have, used almost entirely for routine road driving, is it worth the effort? I can see how it's technically beneficial, but is it going to be practically beneficial to me or am I just over-analysing again?

Yes, you can just do that for inspection. I don't think the Disco servo is the same, but I stand to be corrected.

It looks like that site has been taken down. Shame - it was as entertaining as it was horrifying! That book was OK in many respects - it showed a lot of different suspension schemes used by 4wd manufacturers, (all US), some of which seemed quite bizarre but entirely reasonable. Where it went awry was in showing off-the-shelf modifications. Everything was very glossily painted in bright primary colours, looking pretty and neat on first inspection, but much of it was clearly unstable or unworkable, looking from an engineering perspective like many of the red-neck crates on that site. It was worth the read, but demonstrates that you have to be careful to get information from more than one source. By the way, I was in and out of MLA this morning, Grem - I've never seen it looking so green!

When I bought a "recon" 12J from a well known Leeds based specialist with a keen interest in rallying, , I soon found they tried something like that - the slot had presumably been damaged and they'd welded it up, filing the key to fit the mishapen slot. In the process, they ovalised the end of the shaft, so they drilled an offset grub screw halfway in the pulley, half in the crank, to stabilise the crank. Unfortunately, they had the pulley pressed the wrong way at the time and secured it off centre. No matter, the crank was bent in the middle anyway!

When I first did the conversion, I did have problems with 4th, but the spigot bush hadn't been replaced, as was specified, by the engineering shop when they did the rebore and grind. Replacing it sorted it out and I haven't had even a twitch from the gear stick since, just in third. My engine is a Discovery 200, modified with Defender manifolds and mounts to fit the 109, and the flywheel housing is a pretty snug fit into the bell housing. I think its alignment is alright, though I haven't gone to the lengths you describe - I figured that any significant misalignment would prevent the primary pinion sliding through the splines and into the new spigot bush without a hell of a lot of force to slide the clutch plates while engaged, and they didn't need much pressure at all to mate up. Conveniently, the Tdis and Series engines share the same spigot bush! You see what I mean about my luck, though - loads of people run a Tdi and coiler axles on leafs or 3.54s in Series axles, but I seem to be the only one coming a cropper! A couple of friends, one who is a REME mechanic and the other a very experienced LR mechanic, reckon the gear may have had a metalurgical fault exacerbated by the oilway cross drilling. Maybe... It still seems a little too coincidental with being six months after the axle swap for me to dismiss it, and I can't help but feel you're right about it being the diff ratios.