mickeyw

Ditto. Not sorted the cubby yet, but it's actually worked out handy without one. I can get 6' long things in without folding the seats, plus the kids can walk through to the rear. The seats can fold fully forward, if the headrest is pulled out and the seat base removed.

This rather depends on how you use your vehicle. Frequent driving through the sloppy brown stuff not only means frequent adjustment of the drums is necessary, but the complete removal of the drums to clean out dried muck that causes varius components to rust a jam up. It takes quite a lot of time! I found converting to a disk rear axle on my 90 a complete revelation from a maintenance POV. You still burn through pads in the mud, but generally a blast with the jet wash is all that is needed to keep everything in working order. A disk conversion is on the cards for my 110 at some point.

We had a '97 110 300Tdi CSW, and that had the Boge strut on the Salisbury axle. I was under the impression the strut was discontinued when the later (Td5 era) axle came in. I could be wrong...

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I have a Colchester Student, which has a 3hp motor. When I was researching phase converters I came to conclude that the digital inverters wouldn't allow me to use the machines own controls without a whole lot of rewiring. I was keen to use the machine's own switchgear as it included the emergency-stop foot pedal. Basically I wanted to just plug in and go, to which end I purchased a 3kw rotary converter from Transwave. Also I'm not bothered about the variable phase function. The machine has sufficient speed options. I just need phase conversation. It's a complicated world ou

Well, well, well. I thought I had seen most vehicles in my life time, but this is the first time I've seen or heard of a Reliant Ant. What a quirky looking thing! We used to know an English couple that spent most of the year living on their elderly yacht in Spain. They used to drive a Robin back and forth from England and back. The hours we used to spend with them, watching various bemused foreigners checking out their 3 wheeled car 🤣

Mud flap brackets Handbrake bracketry Rear tub lateral supports Door frames Seat belt fixing brackets

A grinder is one of not so many power tools that are used for a longer duration, and under fairly heavy load. I use my cordless ones for 'quick' jobs such as a small cutting a modest sized piece of sheet steel, then deburr with the other grinder. Big de-rusting jobs with the cheek poker are best left to mains powered versions.

I went through this exact same path with the V8. Unless you have little wheels a 1.4 is the way to go. Having an auto in a Defender (with the correct gearing) totally transforms the drive. No heavy clutch makes traffic jams a breeze. No slow agricultural gear changes.

All this talk of electronic gadgetry sounds like it would get expensive. Surely you can pick up a whole 3.9 V8 D1 auto for sensible money, and just throw the necessary bits at the Defender and sell off the leftovers. All that money saved on shiny parts from Ashcrofts would buy you a fair bit of petrol That's what I did with my old 90, except I bought a RRC.

This is exactly why I have resisted building one so far. I don't wish to curse the snow away

A modest amount of grease on the moving parts would be ideal. Too much of it and you'll just attract excess much dust and dirt.

Fantastic, and I am sure great fun. Sadly we get so little snow in the south-east, otherwise I'd have made a plough too.

I am a long term Solidworks user, but I recently installed Fusion 360 at home to see what it's like. I've actually found it (as an experienced CAD user) very intuitive and easy to pick up. Knowing the 'correct' way to construct a model is definitely an advantage, and I can see that for a CAD noob it could seem a little daunting. Fusion handles assemblies a bit differently to SW, but I quite like it, and even prefer some features over SW. As Si mentioned, weldments are a very useful tool if you do a lot of tube fabbing.

TBH you need to be running pretty big tyres before you need spacers, unless you're running original LR steel or alloy wheels. I'm running 255/85R16s (approx 33" dia) on cheap steel modular rims on my 110. I'm not sure what the offset of these rims is, but I can get as much turning lock as the swivels permit, and enjoy an excellent turning circle, and no tyre rubbing on the radius arms. My suspension is all standard spec for a 1986 110 CSW.