Cliff Pountney

I used to bend up RTW and more recently CDS using a hydraulic bender from Staffa. But last year I found this guy on the web and for my current (Imp) project I bought the hoops from him. They are bent up on a CNC machine and you're unlikely to get close to this accuracy using a manual bender. I don't know Thomas personally and I'm not on any commision but IMHO this service is the rubbish and I won't be bending my own hoops again. BTW the postage is very reasonable so don't think you need to collect. Tube Bender Limited 1440 Warwick Road Knowle Solihull B93 9LG Mobile: 07989 072 693 Home: 01564 770938 Email: tom@tube-bender.co.uk Website: www.tube-bender.co.uk Cliff

Where are you planning to draw the cold air from? Is there an advantage to ducting it to draw air from outside? 1) If air is drawn from inside it gets replaced by cold air being drawn in from outside (around door gaps, etc). 2) Any gasses in the shop get drawn into the burner. That might be a good thing but could also lead to an explosion. (unlikely agreed). 3) If the chimney is not drawing for any reason and you arrange the ducting to drain any carbon monoxide gets dumped outside. 4) This final reason is tenuous in the extreme.......cold air is denser so you should get more heat. That might be negated by having to heat that cold air up more. I think I would look at providing a door seal and an external air pick up. Great looking device though. I need to build one! Cliff

Those who don't want to fit fiddle breaks need to try this driving trick. If you have a permanent 4WD with selectable centre diff lock, try slipping the diff lock out, turning full lock, pullling the hand brake on hard and giving it a little gas. The back end the pivots around the centre of the rear axle. It won't work in very situation but is useful when it does. Cliff

That's exactly it. The rivet should stick out of the back of the joint by a distance equal to it's diameter. Too little and the rivet is expanded in the hole and fails to clamp the joint, too much and you run the risk of the 'nail' shearing before the joint is clamped. Just come back in the house after using the air riveter; the only down side is a leak which makes the compressor keep starting up and drowning out the Archers It's also useful to have washers which can be used to spread the load when rivetting softer materials. Cliff

Air riveters are wonderful, I wouldn't be without mine. They make a much better job than ant of the hand powered devices. My LR has an aluminimum body stretched over a steel frame, like a Tomcat, and there must be at least 300 rivets holding the aluminium to the steel. You need to be careful not to use rivets which are too long as they may not pull up tight. You only want to be about 1 diameter longer than the joint it needs to make. I mainly use 4mm diameter aluminium rivets 8mm long but somethimes also use 6 and 10mm long, only very occasionally would I ise a rivet longer than 10mm. Cliff

Good design is just as important as good welding, maybe better put as bad design or bad welding can cause failure. Try and think about how the forces are being generated and moved from one part of the structure to another. I don't know what your cross member looks like or what you are doing with it but if I were adding a simple box member to the back of a chassis for extreme recovery I would consider- Adding diagonal bars from near the recovery point to somewhere on the chassis rails up by the bump stops. Adding a horzontal triangular plate on top of the box to chassis rail joint. You can put one on the bottom but it's a crud trap. Plating the full height of the box at the recovery point. That said I still wouldn't make it out of 6mm ! Good luck. That welding looks fine to me. My old Unimog had a spring built ino the rear hitch to try and absorb the shock loading. Wouldn't help with a KERR but is probably usefull when towing with a bar or if some pyscho uses a chain. Cliff

Dave, A 130A DIY mig set should be up to the job provided you prepare the joint properly. You'll need to V out any butt joints and weld external corners 'open', You may struggle a little with internal corners, What you will find is that the duty cycle of your set will only allow you to weld for a short period then the performance will drop off. At that stage stop and give it half an hour to recover. Multiple passes are perfectly acceptable provided you get good penetration and don't include any carp into the joint. They just take longer and may give you more distortion. What are you doing that requires a 6mm thick cross member? I've built some Land Rovers which have been used for 'team recovery', which is absolutely mental in terms of loading the crossmember (20' snatches on kinetic ropes), but we only ever used 100 x 50 x 3mm box with a bit of extra reinforcing here and there. Cliff

I have a brand new valve and all the bits to fit it that I bought a few years back and never fitted )as I when for a mechanical spool valve). It would be ideal for a MM upgrade. Drop me an email on cpountn1@ford.com and I'll send you a pdf of the spec' sheet. Cliff

I used to fill my EP90 bits from a 25 litre drum using a bend pipe hooked into the diff (or whatever) and an old PAS pump driven by an electric drill to do the pumping. Worked fine but these days I tend to use squeezy bottles. Cliff

Tensioner wise it's a fixed unit modified from a standard Rover V8 tensioner. Maybe a spring tensioner will be the way to go. I like Team Idris's idea of having a spring purely for overload protection. Food for thought. I spoke to the very helpful guys at Red Winches about thier tooth belt kit but unfortunately they didn't do one for a Rover V8. I think First Four supply that kit. I control the high / low / free from a car gear shifter. This one was from an old Merc but a lot of manual cars produced in last 15 years have a similar cable shifter arrangement. Once you get rid of any gating mechanism you are left with one cable which operates when you move the lever in the x axis and another which operates in the y axis. It's then just a matter of getting some cables which are long enough to connect to levers on the winch but the cables need to be of a variety which can push as well as pull. To hold the desired state and avoid any 'error' states (in this case selecting high and low at the same time) fabricate a gate pattern in a plate screwed to the top of the shifter. The low / free cable is the grey one coming from the left of the photo. That's from a BW65 shifter, probably Rover SDI. The high / free is the burgundy one at the top of the photo. That was a cable I had made when I installed the PTO winch. The high / free is not connected in that photo but connects to a lever on the back of the shifter housing. The position it is shown in (back/right) is LOW. Forward/right is FREE and forward/left is HIGH. There's a heavy spring added into the shifter to bias to the back position and a spring on the wich to bias it to the right, I took high / free plunger spring out as it requires a lot of effort to overcome it and I wanted it to default to free rather than high. Here's the linkage to control the high / free. The photo above is taken from above (but the winch is mounted upside down). When the cable is pulled the arm pulls the high / free plunger in. It is returned by the red spring which I think is from a series drum brake. The low / free plunger is activated by another lever under the winch. The picture is taken laying down behind the right rear wheel if that helps. The shiney bit at the very top is the chassis rail. There was a reason fro mounting it upside down, honest. Cliff

I think the weakest link is probably the mag' clutch. The front face is not very thick and I guess that would bend before the belt went. I'm allways in two minds about sacrificial bits. If you can be sure they will 'blow' first thats fine but without a lot of destructive testing or clever calculations how do you calibrate the fuse? I've added a cover to the clutch to act as a finger guard and protect the clutch from the muck that hits the bonnet then drops back down. I think I may look at adding a short tray under the chassis to block stones from below. There were some dead ends in the install. I tried to control tle winch gears using push bike brake cables, effectively moving the normal Mile Marker over centre levers into the cab. The stretch in the cables scuppered that.

I was very very lucky with the ebay purchase. The price was low because he didn't really know what he had and was having a clear out. The luck continued as he was only 25 miles away and the following week I was pretty much driving past his door anyway. Hopefully I'll have some luck selling the bits I no longer need. I might then be able to afford to get it on the road! All the pulleys are custom in some respect. The bottom pulley is an HTD 8M 64 tooth bored out to over the back of the standard V8 front pulley. The pump pulley is the same but bored out to fit over the mag' clutch. The idler is a V8 fan belt idle with a fat rim welded on. J&M belts in Thurrock supplied the toothed pulleys and the belt. They were very helpful. www.jmbelts.com I've a few worries about stones getting caught and the alike but until I start using it in earnest I won't know. Cliff

After reading many fine threads about other peoples winch instalations I thought I might bore you with mine. That and I need to post 20 posts so I can sell some of the the stuff I acquired and didn't need! This is my vehicle except it's now a bit less tall as I've chopped a chunk off the roof since this was taken.... (Photo credit to BosunCam) When first built it I had a PTO winch in the back which would winch from the front or the back. This was run on a drive train that my mate Andy and I had engineered. At 60' / min on the bottom layer it was plenty quick enough but changing the shear pin was a pain in the butt and by the amount of bronze I was seeing in the oil I think I was over speeding it towards destruction. The death knoll was when I changed the transmission as my LR PTO wouldn't fit on the BW65 / Ashcroft / series hybrid tranny. What to replace the PTO winch with was going to be set by budget as the whole lot needed to cost less than £500. I did already have a standard Milemarker winch and a mechanical spool valve but the rest had to be found. Winch - I had a standard Mile Marker with the White 205cc motor from a friend's challenge truck I broke up. This was going to be mounted in the same way as the PTO winch but the White motor was to be changed. The drum was made about 25mm deeper by adding side plates and changing the tie bars. Pump - A super find on Ebay produced a unused 20cc pump and a electromagnetic drive kit with a spare coil and clutch for £35. Bargin! Valve - I had a spool valve block with pressure relief and a flow adjusting slice from the broken truck. The only downside was it is a little smaller than ideal at 40 l/min. But this worked well with the pump and set the constraints for the rest of the system. Here's a picture without the transmission tunnel cover. It's a bit of a snake pit. How the guys with bigger pipes manage it I don't know. The filter is the orange lump at the back. The lever next to the hand brake controls the high/free and low/free plungers using a couple of Bowden cables. It's gated to give just low, high or free so it's not possible to accidently select high and low together. Not as nice as a Saley air kit but I don't run air on the vehicle so that wasn't an option anyway. Motor and over centre valve - A 100cc EPRM motor and bolt on unclamping valve came new from Flowfit. The motor wasn't quite a direct fit to the MileMarker but an adaptor plate and some other machining sorted that out. Tank - Finding somewhere to put the tank was a right pain. The solution was to move the battery and use the space for a tank. At 10 litres it may be a little small so a cooler may be required at a later date. On the up side it is very close to the pump keeping the suction line short. A friend fab'ed up a tank in aluminium with a large hole on the top. All the fittings go through a steel top plate so if I need to make any changes, like adding a cooler or changing the strainer, I can do it without draining the system and using mig. Pump drive - This was the most involved bit. I used HTD belt drive. There's a description at the end of this thread - http://forums.lr4x4....showtopic=74548 Hoses - Suction - 1" ID, about 0.5m long. Pressure and service - 1/2" ID. Return 3/4" ID. Return includes canister filter (behind gear box). If you manged to read this to the end, well done. Hopefully something in there might benefit someone else on thier install. It's yet to me tested out but an MOT will be had soon then you may see it out and about in Essex. Cliff.

The Xxx would get you plenty of hits from search engines but maybe not many sales. I think sercurity needs a two stage approach. Something really obvious as a sign like your product then something difficult to detect probably in the engine wiring harness. Cliff