Eightpot

My thoughts are that petrol is going to get so expensive over the next 10-15 years, especially if fuel stations start to close with reducing demand, many of these old guzzling classics may lose a lot of value and end up being quaint ornaments in someones man cave or museum. Also we have it pretty soft at the moment on classics, no tax/mot on many, a free hand with modifications etc, no emmisions tests - it would only take one piece of new legislation to render them fairly useless. If it's a good offer and you haven't had to work for it, worth considering. Also consider the realistic cost to restore it, which is always 4x what you think 😄

The fuel pump is triggered from the ecu on a 3.9 from memory as standard, though on a conversion who knows. You'll have to trace the wire from the pump forwards and see where it pops out...

The most important bit would be the correct style of rooflights - there were a few variations depending on which force, but most had a light up sign box on one or two rotating beacons. The American style plastic light bar didn't come in till around 1980. (On that pic you can make out the vinyl seats, no headrests and central speedo pod on the dash)

The seat cloth changed from one beige cloth to another, though I think most police vehicles would have used the Fleetline spec with vinyl seats, no carpet just the palomino vinyl mats. Door trims, dash all the same. Three spoke steering wheel stayed till at least 81. Police rangies also usually had a big calibrated speedo housed in a seperate dash pod, switch panel for lights/sirens, a large radio set, boot full of kit, cones, broom & radio batteries etc - they used the stiffer red/white springs to cope with the extra weight. But depending on how close up to a camera the car would get, put some lights and stickers on a white rangie on steel wheels and you won't notice much of that from a distance or as it drove past.

The M52 was dreamt up to fill the gap left when the V8 was dropped, and the 1.6 box was to give similar torque at low rpm for people towing fishing boats and offroad caravans through sand etc- I thought it felt way to low geared - 1st gear almost redundant - and a 1.4 would have been absolutely fine.

Not done the swap, but had a couple of South African M52 Defenders. The engine does sit very well in a Defender, is very quiet and smooth and pretty tame and driveable when tootling about, only really getting going when you let the revs run out, then it's a beast. Downside to the M52 - spares, sensors etc are stupidly expensive and not readily available now (over £200 for a maf for example, aftermarket stuff largely useless) I had to get most stuff shipped from Germany. You can use a lot of parts from the p38 to convert, but will bump up against a couple of probs. Long term I think the m52 would be a nicer proposal over running a stone age V8 but not so easy to convert.

You wouldn't notice the differences on a police rangie from 74 to 83, aside from bonnet or door mounted mirrors

Agree with this - on the odd occasion I follow my old route to school when visiting my folks, it's apparant that there has been a fundamental change in how we work, how we live and how important the car has become. Roads which used to have a car on the drive every other house 35 years ago now have two, three or four cars and vans per house till no more can fit in the street. I don't agree that the way forward is to just change how vehicles are propelled, I very much like the idea of ev's, but filling the world with even more vehicles and creating mountains of poisonous waste seems madness. We need to start moving back to working and shopping locally, and planners need to stop reshaping towns and cities around the car - as much as I like cars I don't want my evironment to be created with them as the primary concern. Many of the small old victorian market and industrial revolution towns near where I live have been largely torn down to make ugly A routes straight through them covered in ugly street furniture, and supermarkets given the freedom to restructure what's left and actually have roads re-routed to direct customers straight in and past the local businesses before spitting them out the other side. I just looked up some data from the 2018 National Travel Survey which shows that comparing 1972 with 2018, on average in the UK people made approximately the same number of trips per year, but the length and duration of those trips gradually increases - so we're all just getting used to commuting/shopping further away. Survey attached - it's quite an interesting read national-travel-survey-2018.pdf

Only set tdc with the flywheel slot, ignore the cast web other than a rough guide. You need to set the pump lift with pump on the engine so you can match it with engine tdc ideally - but you must be pretty close, sounds like its a little advanced, if you've got enough play on the sprocket slots I'd just adjust the pump spindle to retard it till it runs nice. I usually add a little advance anyway.

I made some 30x30s last year, which was perfect for me - years of long distance land rovering have hurt my hip muscles and having a dipped seat leaves me in agony now - 30mm gets the hip angle right and lowers the steering wheel a touch which is nicer for long distances. I'm fairly tall but didn't really need much extra back rake but added 30mm. One of the best mods I've ever made .

Turning the timing sprocket clockwise would retard it, but remember when adjusting the timing, its the pump spindle that's being rotated and the sprocket stays still - effectively turning the sprocket anti-clockwise.

I think a lot of rubbery items are substituted with plastics/silicone on cheaper items - looks similar but just doesn't perform as well.

I think the door switches feed into the A pillar from the front of the bulkhead, the wires to the roof lights run up behind the windscreen trim on the A pillar, along the roof channel and across to the lamps.

I've done a couple - you can replace the foam with closed cell neoprene tape which is readily available. If the matrix is leaking it may be repairable, the inlet/outlet pipes tend to leak where they join the core due to years of vibration, and can often be soldered back up quite easily.

You may have a connector in the loom behind the dash binnacle for the dim/dip relay, which either needs a dim/dip relay installing or bridge the terminals with a short loop of wire. Do a search on this forum for dim/dip relay. If you don't have this relay or bridging wires, you'll have no lights. Hazard switches can be fickle things - before you go to great lengths try another good switch first, indicator circuits run through this switch and nine times out of ten its the culprit, followed by flasher relay on fuse panel. The horn has a purple 12v+ to one terminal, black wire on other terminal runs back to the horn stalk. Inside the horn stalk is another wire attached to earth - pressing the button pushes a copper contact across the two wires, making the circuit. Quite easy to fault find on that circuit. No blue tell tale for high beam may be a bad printed circuit on the back of the instrument warning cluster that the bulb holder sits in, if high beam is actually working - easy to check with a multimeter if voltage is present at the connector block and making its way across to the bulb. If high beam not working, its usually the switch. Rear fog lamp problem sounds like a faulty switch

The sender is just a resistor, it's possible for them to fail and give variable readings as they heat up. You could check the wire using a multimeter - a simple check would be to take the green blue wire off the back of the temp gauge, the spade off the sensor and use the continuity setting to see if there's any earthing of the cable (one probe on the wire spade, other probe to an earth) Or fit a temp wire from gauge to sender & see if it works any better.

I'm a bearmach trade customer and have noticed a reduction in quality on many items recently, for example today I tried to fit BM rocker gaskets on a V8 - they were wrong size & holes a mile out, went straight in the bin.

In order of cost of things to try- Clean up spade terminal on sender & make sure spade fitting is snug Check for breaks/chaffing on the sender wire Fit a new sender Gauges themselves tend to be pretty reliable.

I've been using britpart seal for the last ten years and not had a problem. They're soft enough to go in without a fight and seal well. I just fitted a bearmach seal on a rangie, and it was beyond awful, just like hard plastic with no give. Not tried thier defender ones for a few years but based on that I don't think I'd bother.

Also the mitary registration was often stenciled on to any removeable items, like battery box covers, underneath seat bases, jack, radio kit, sometimes under the bonnet.

It's probably under contract FVE 22 304, which was a big contract for 110s in 1985. You might be able to pull up the contract fulfilment list with some googling.

I think the original poster may have resolved this now as 12 years have elapsed, however opening a stuck door is easy from the inside by using a slim screwdriver to push the latch pawl upwards which sits above the striker.

Yes 100% you need to change that stub axle or it will damage your new seal. Not sure on the part number sorry.

Last time I dealt with this kind of fault it was down to an overheated and melted solenoid on the starter motor. I suspect that may have been brought on by another fault but it was a few years ago - possibly a faulty ignition switch or wiring short that kept the motor spinning while the engine was running. Incidentaly, the wiring on that solenoid looks awfully close to touching the metalwork on the photo?

I had a poke around the twin engined 2CV Dakar entrant at Goodwood a couple of years back - very nicely put together https://youtu.be/nbo_aRnmLCw