Night Train

How about having it electrically folding?

My Series 3 had its transfer box lever padlocked in neutral, an easy but unsightly mod.

It can be very accurate. I had a friend who cut circles cleaner then a hole saw and would cut between two lines a millimeter apart and leave both scribe lines intact. I have used jigsaw blades to cut 60x8mm steel angle. About one blade per cut. Took ages. After I started the third cut I gave up and reverted to a hacksaw, it was quicker and quieter.

I had a detachable gear stick that was then locked across the underside of the pedals. I also used a locking pedal box that covered the pedals and left the lock in an almost inaccessible position to make picking difficult. Another trick was to slide the seat forward (I had fitted MGB seats) so that there was no legroom and then padlock through the seat slider rail so that it couldn't slide back. As the padlock was under the seat it was difficult to get at with a bolt cropper. Something I did with my MGB was to tip the drivers seat forward and lock the non removable headrest to the steering wheel with a motor bike U lock. The U lock was bent so that the U went from behind the head rest, through the steering wheel spokes and then under the column where the locking bar went.

Electric drive with individual wheel motors and independent suspension giving huge ground clearance without being too high off the ground or having massive wheels and tyres. The chassis can be a large section central backbone that houses the battery tray.

Just a thought. The chassis is fairly flexible anyway. If you fitted a very stiff crossmember would that just move and focus stresses onto the chassis rails where it meets the new crossmember? When I used to do this I would spread any loading from chassis flex through to the rear chassis rails with flitch plates and some triangulation. That made the chassis rails become gradually more rigid rather then a sudden stiffness change at the crossmember welds. The extra work would show up on any inspection.

Your mate is right. The torque going in the gearbox may only be as much as the V8 will produce but what you have done in fitting the higher ratio Range Rover diffs is increased the load to the output of the gearbox. In other words you have made it much harder for the gearbox to turn the prop shaft. So when you apply that V8 torque, which is already higher then the series box is designed for, it will have to transmit that torque through its gears and shafts. You said that all you have done is to reduce the torque in your half shafts. Where has that torque gone? It has gone upstream into your gearbox. As said above, it is like running much taller tyres, or perhaps hanging a heavy trailer on the back and dumping the clutch to try and get your usual performance. If you are gentle with the throttle then the box may just wear a bit more or faster then it would other wise. If you are hard on and off the throttle then the box will probably give up fairly quickly.

I had that happen to me and my Dad too. I got a summons for unpaid fines and no road tax for a car I had p/x to a dealer quite a few years before. With a lot of digging I found that the DVLA were unable to trace the current owner and so decided to pursue the known previous owner (me) instead as that was the last factual address they had. With a lot of arguing back and forth I managed to find the sales receipt for my then current car with the details of the dealer p/x details and told then to pursue the dealer as they were the last known keepers of the car. Didn't hear from them again. When I was a kid my dad was arrested by the Police for armed robbery. He was innocent but he was the last known, honest, owner of the getaway van. He had also sold the van a few years previously but DVLA and the Police seemed to think that it was still his. Fortunately Dad had also sold to a dealer and was able to pass the buck and prove his innocence with copies of receipts of the sale.

Secure glass won't stop a thief either, they just lever the door top away from the frame and bend it down to gain access. Common thing with modern gutterless cars. I used to have a 'secure' box in my Land Rover, it just meant that the thieves did more damage to get the whole box out when they couldn't open it. The security must have made them think there was something more then my sunglasses and a few cassettes in there.

How about a good interface for electric drive control? It would have a wide range of uses in differing vehicle types. You could look at diesel electric in a Land Rover. A diesel engine could drive a generator where the gear box would be and there would be individual wheel traction motors and a method of controlling the current to each wheel motor to ensure the correct wheel speed and to control traction, braking and regeneration at the wheel. If you made a 'black box' that did all that then we could lose the mechanical bits between engine and wheels. The design could also be used for pure electric vehicles as well. The idea could be extended further if you made the system modular so that a vehicle would have as many modules as it has drive wheels managed by a central controller. That would allow commercial electric drive vehicles to add axles as needed and open up powered trailers that really work.

If you don't know it then you could get an approximate calculation of the current rear spring rate. Measure the spring length on level ground and then add weight over the rear axle to shorten the spring by 1/2 inch. The added load will give you close to the lbs/inch of one spring. That would be your starting point. If you know the free length of the spring then you can calculate approximately the unladen vehicle weight on the spring. Then weigh everything you are going to put in the back of your vehicle and work out from that what length and rate you will need to keep it level when loaded. You will also need to see where it will be unloaded with the up rated spring as it could end up being very high. This is only approximate as some of the added load will be taken by the front axle and the pitch of the vehicle as it is loaded will also affect the measurement. To make it more accurate you could measure the spring length unladen and on the level then drive the rear wheels onto a 1/2"board and load until the spring is 1/2" shorter and the vehicle is at the same level as before. It will be a balance between free length and spring rate to get an acceptable ride quality and height between loaded and unloaded. It is still better to not carry as much stuff unless it is needed and set your headlights slightly low if you are going to be carrying a load as it is bad to dazzle the space shuttle and other drivers. Also given it is a 90" loading the back will have a bigger effect on the headlight aim then it would on a 110 or 130.

I once had to completely assemble a S2 body without any chassis bolts from the front bulkhead backwards. The doors were shut and aligned and then clamped to the frames. I then put a board across the back door opening and used a winch to stretch the body to fit onto the rear cross member and then fitted all the bolts before releasing the tension. It worked. The job was done at 3am in London and the Land Rover was boarding a ferry at 8am from Dover to start a cross country drive to Italy.

The practical side of things. With the engine cold and standing for a while most of the oil will be in the sump anyway. You should be able to drain what is in there to start with. Just be prepared to leave it dribbling for a while. Due to the weight of the lump and that the hoist/gantry/crane is going to be on soft ground you should make sure that it is standing on timber to spread the weight. Also you will find it easier to lift the engine and then roll the vehicle out from under it. Make sure that you have a trolley or a slidey board on some thick plywood sheets to take the engine away.

That does have a bit of 'old school' hot rod about it. Given my other fetish it could end up like this:

There is definately something not quite right with the way it looks to be really likable. Proportions are not quite right and the colour doesn't work (nor does the flying helmet). The silver one looks like it is a two seater with the body wider at the back end for the seats and has better proportions.

That sort of looks a bit twee and toy towny and chunky. The Series two radiator panel doesn't help, needs to be taller and thinner and on leaf springs. The head lamps also need to be seperate from the grille on brackets. That is a bit more like it, a bit Mad Max. Maybe with a long sweaping six pot exhaust manifold out the side of the bonnet... I would go with just the rear roll hoop and a proper radiator housing to suit. I'd have to think about the safety aspect of an exposed fuel tank right at the back end though. I do like the cycle wings but maybe swept wings and running boards over the exhaust would be easier to keep legal. So what I would need to start it would be a tax exempt Series 2 LWB. It would need an engine swap to a 6 pot and auto but I could cope with a reliable Land Rover lump and a remote gear change.

Just a thought going around in my head at the moment.... If I got a LWB series Land Rover and removed all the body work and rebodied with 1930's style two seat racer type open top bodywork would there be any obvious problems with MOT, SVA or IVA? Was thinking of having legal lights, cycle wings and pointy bits of chassis covered and outriggers removed but mechanicals all (mostly) standard but may think about an autobox with the selector on the right and outside the body alongside the hand brake lever. The body would have to fit the width of the chassis rails so it would be snug for two seats. I've just always liked the look from that period and fancied something different. Blower Bentley on a Series chassis but with 4wd and a winch instead of the blower. Scale would be about right, Blower Bentleys were huge. A bit like that bloke who turned a Land Rover in to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Are you thinking of real building or is it going to be a vapour build? I would be interested to see what you do if you start metal bashing. WRT the rear overhang, on my 6x6 the chassis was the same length as the standard 109" chassis. The rear axle centre line located just below the rear crossmember withthe bogie centre line close to the original rear axle position. This meant that the rear cross member, and tow hook, could never ground out. The rear body work over hung only a bit behind the back edge of the tyres with the body supports sloping back to the crossmember at 45deg. The over all wheelbase was extended by pushing the front axle forward to the front bumper position so, again, no over hang.

I suppose an alternative idea for just removing the body would be to leave the pedal box on the chassis. Another way would be to have the master cylinder attached to the chassis and a seperable mechanical linkage from it to the pedal. Some cars have the master cylinder on the left and a rotating cross beam connects it to the pedal on the right. You could locate the master cylinder somewhere else and operate it via a set of rods, or a cable if relative movement is a problem. How about a small hydraulic system like a clutch master/slave cylinder that then operates the brake master cylinder elsewhere. Just separate the slave from the brake master cylinder to break the system.

In theory the system would function but it would all depend on what parts were available and how they could be used. I did look into using diffs to get crown wheels and pinions to make bevel boxes for just your description in the hope that they would be cheaper then getting specialist bevel boxes. The problem is that diffs and their innards don't lend themselves to this sort of conversion easily. Their overall bulk would make an axle very wide, effectively the width of 5 diffs with suspension mountings, brake housings, stub axles... Just using the crown wheels and pinions would mean very accurate housings to be made up and also some fiddly shafting to fit the crown wheel without the need for the wide diff gear carrier and bearings. I looked into industrial bevel drive gear boxes but they are very expensive to get new and very difficult to find just enough of the right ones second hand. Also industrial gearboxes tend not to be designed for the sort of shock loading at the wheel of an off roader. Any play induced breakage would be very costly. The scale of fabrication involved probably be would be akin to building a pair of portal axles from scratch around a set of random diff gears, easier to just get one ready made and adapt. However, if I was to make a walking beam axle I would do something like this: The chain tensioning system would be like this:

Yes, adding axles is only effective if the axles are load and torque balancing to ensure that there is adequate and even contact with the ground for traction. Vehicle weight and floatation is also an issue hence mine only had 7.50x16 tyres and not 9.00x16 or bigger. Even then I was running at best part of 2.5 tons unladen. Traction with an extra ton plus in the back was really rather good! The downside of having an extra axle is the effective overhang for loading. The balance point over the rear wheels moves from being the rear axle to being the pivot between the axles so some 20" further forward. Important if lift towing or loading right at the back of the load bed. Weight there effectively unloads the front axle. I was looking for heavy and grippy for flat towing and pulling on and off road more then ultimate off road though I did also want it to be able to climb and articulate over rough ground too. A Centaur half track would have been a nice alternative...

Bill, Yeah, big truck axles would be overkill and over size but I was thinking of the stub axle strength primarily. There probably are lots of axles that could be used as a good starting point but on a personal point I do have a thing about wanting the strongest, toughest transmission so I will go for an over kill. I did design using a whole train of Tbox spur gears with a spur gear cut off the intermediate gear to make the smaller input gear in the centre. I intended the whole train of gears to run on intermediate gear roller bearings but the friction was going to be really high. I then thought about chain drive and progressed with drawings for 3/4" and 1" duplex chain with a double sprocket in the centre as the input but that made the walking beam chain case about 6" wide on the inside to cover the two runs of duplex chain. Calculations with 1" simplex chain showed that it probably wouldn't be strong enough for harsh off road use given the relatively small sprocket size needed to get the 2:1 ratio. I also though of shaft drive with bevel gear boxes and also skew helical gears inside the walking beams. but cost was going to be horrendous as nothing was 'off the shelf'. Then I even considered hydraulic drive and ideas got really silly. That is when I began thinking of other ways around having gears or chains as in my free hand sketch and ultimately to just having two axles. I think my limitations were down to budget, access to engineering machines and lack of real life experience of chain drives.

Here is a photo of the set up on my 6x6 The location of the pivot wouldn't make much difference in real terms as the unloading of the leading wheel is due to the drive torque needing to have something to react against. I've tried a number of geometries and ratios in Lego Technic and, when push comes to shove with anything less then a 2:1 ratio, under load the walking beam will try to rotate around the axle when the wheel is unable to break traction and spin. It works in the same way as a planetry gear set with the walking beam becoming the cage and rotating with the wheels as planet gears and the ground being the annulus. I have also looked a DeDion type axle where the walking beam pivots on a dead axle tube and a diff in the chassis connects to the walking beams via CV joints and exposed shafts. The drive input to the gears/chains in the walking beams would still need to at or very near the pivot point of the walking beam though and if the axle tube was designed as an open channel then the flexible drive shaft could still enter the walking beam through the pivot. Another method would be to have a diff casing with a small gear case attached where the axle tubes were to give two drive flanges as close to the diff as possible. These could then be used to drive flexible shafts that then drive stub axles on a walking beam. This would do away with gears or chains in the walking beam and reduce unsprung weight to something less then half a ton! For strength the 'dead' axle tube would be able to protrude right through the walking beam to get the bearing as far apart as possible to counter the lateral loading. Here's the real thing from the Scammell Explorer parts manual. The whole assembly slides onto the axle tube with the spring seat going between the gear case and the reinforcing web. Just for fun...

A nice Scammell Constructor on Ebay.

I doubt that the LR hub would be anywhere near strong enough to act as a sole pivot for a walking beam gear case. Imagine a case 40" long infront and behind the hub leavering on it when a corner was taken, the hub would pop off the bearings or the stub axle would break. On a real Scammell the gear case is braced back onto the axle tube in board of the leaf spring on a rotating bush. The need for a 2:1 gear ratio is to counter the driving torque. On a standard axle the driving and braking torque is transmitted to the chassis via the leaf springs or radus arms and A frames etc. The walking beam when the brakes are applied would try to do a 'stoppie' and lift the rear wheel rotating the whole gear case around the axle bearings. Under acceleration the same thing would happen and the gear case would try to do a 'wheelie'. The 2:1 gear ratio reduces that to an acceptable amount. A lower ratio would be even better but is impractial. If I was building a walking beam gear/chain case I would use a bigger axle as a starting point. Maybe something from a 5-7 ton truck with tubular axle tubes. It would be easier to just use a complete walking beam axle from a scraper. On my 6x6 I used Sailsbury axles made wider by extending the short tube and having long half shafts in each side. The middle axle had a massive A frame welded on with its apex just below the prop shaft flange on the T box and a short prop was fitted. The rear axle was the same but its apex was jut above the middle axle diff. The A frames were located to cross members via a LR110 radius arm chassis bush, the only off the shelf cheap thing I could find. The A frames took care of the fore and aft location and the driving/braking torques to the chassis. The springs were inverted 680lb/inch leaves that were pivoted on a housing that fitted a LR stubaxle on the side of the chassis. (see images posted earlier by someone else.) The ends of the springs were on suspended shackles to the axle. This allowed the axles to both spring and swing freely up and down. The lateral location was via bearing pads on the chassis in front and behind the spring pivot. The pads stopped the spring from moving laterally and that located the axles quit well. It gave each wheel 12" movement up and down so it could drive over a 24" hump without lifting an axle. It was more a copy of the rear bogie arangement on a Scammell Constructor. The front axle was made to match the width of the rear axles and was located with a similar A frame facing back towards the T box. The spring was a pair of LR front springs dismatled and doubled up with the redundent spring eyes cut off. The middle of the spring was on a bearing block on the front cross member so that it could swing freely. The spring was located onto the axle with a fixed eye at one end and a very short fabricated swing shackle at the other end. It gave 18" movement up and down so one wheel could be lifted 36" up with the other on the ground. The T box was something I designed and made. It used only Series T box gears and cut down shafts and was remote mounted. It had an input flange, PTO output flange, front drive and two rear drives. It was a 3 speed box and had counter rotating outputs so the diffs were upside down. The ratios gave both under drive and over drive. The Main G box was a ZF 5 speed with a low crawler 1st and direct drive 5th. With the T box the ratios theoretially gave, at 4000rpm, 1.5mph in bottom 1st and 108mph in high 5th. The torque in low 1st wrecked a few props.