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kiwi series build


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Yup, that was a good rant! I've been out of the "club" scene for a decade or more but actually was on the committee of my local 4WD club when I was more active and well remember the hassles. You could maybe call me a hypocrite 'cos I drive a V8 with fairly tall rubber (33") and only a few days back ripped my mates' paddock to shreds (but to be fair I got stuck pulling logs out for him...). Anyhow, I agree that modern big tyres plus better suspension and traction control/lockers should mean less damage with a good driver. But those egos, huh?

All that said, I love novel thinking and have enjoyed reading your exploits. Cheers.

Don

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LOL I have no issue with playing, my issue is idiots that rip up areas that are sensitive like Macetown track down Queenstown or up here Area 51 on the Napier Tuapo

Any way back to the toy.... one of the issues I had (or on this trip didn't have...) was an air filter, well I've been cleaning up stuff since I'm closing down my business and I found a brand new air filter for an old digger I had... not something that would sell on our version of ebay so decided to use it for the truck

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The box is made from an old range rover fender, took me near on half the afternoon to get all the paint and bog off it LOL going to silicon the seams and rivit the box together and then into place, hopefully will be getting some polycarb dropped off for a sight window

Been thinking about body.... mainly to do with the doors since thats an issue I'm going to have to address soon could you guys direct me to some pic's of decent exo/comp bodies I still want the old girl to look like a landy and I'd like to keep the rear deck but I'm looking for ideas to get my creative thing going LOL

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The shock hoops might move a bit but remember they are only for the damping on compression and rebound not to take weight so they are plenty strong enough and I'm mounted to pipes that are tied through the chassis and doubler plates on both sides

This may sound a bit negative, however, when you drive on a bumpy road, the forces put in by the shock absorber are actually greater than those by the springs as the shock forces depend on the speed of the movements. So if the speed that it compresses by is infinite, the shock effectively goes solid. On rebound, it is not so bad, as the force is only created by the springforce and the gravity pulling the wheel down. I would personally put a bit of triangulation in those hoops myself.

Apart from that, great build!

Daan

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Uniformed - the leaf springs do nothing to locate the axle it is done by the links, it seems more than adequate I was "tram lining" in clay ruts and it stay'd there good enough to bounce me around in the seat, I am planing to go to ball joints on the links this will improve its feel

Daan - LOL you hit the nail on the head "speed"... to be honest I'll be surprised if I use high box on this thing... she is a trailer queen, yes there is the odd time i'll get speed up for momentum but thats 3rd low so its not an issue.... in the long term I was planing on tying the cage into the top of the hoops, that will more than brace them... still looking for inspiration for design at this stage so the rear cage/deck design is still open other than the basics of triangulation

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The front is probably about 6 months off.... I'm down sizing my shed to something I can afford on limited income, just incase my back dosen't get better so my current lease ends the end of this month... still uncertain where I'm moving too the building I had arranged has turned out to be a bit of an issue so I've pulled pin on that worst case it all goes into the garage at home LOL

Plans are too sort little bits at the moment, air box, wiring, wippers, heater/demister... if I'm staying with the rover axles then peg a couple of heads, got an old ARB thats rusty resurrect it and put it out back, possibly fit a hilux slippery up front (been told they can be made to fit, anyone able to point me to any write ups on this), fit fiddle brakes to the rear

Cage the rear of the truck (this is being left open as I want a PTO rear mount winch) and rear mount the radiator

I'll also sort the divorce on the LT95 transfercase... I have a couple so its what I'm going with, picked up a couple of ideas off bills vapour thread so going to add a bearing in there for strength... I'll get the Commy sitting on the floor all bolted up first that way its a quick job of the engine swop, loom will already be wired into the landy, cooling will be sorted just need to plumb up... it'll be a case of engine mounts cross member and drive shafts LOL well thats the plan

With all that done I'll start into the front suspension... that way I can work it round the motor and I'll swop the front axle out for either a Range Rover 10 spline one I have here or if the Patrol ones turn up the patrol ones

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Great plan! I have been thinking about fiddle brakes as a potentially cheaper way to stop unloaded wheels spinning uselessly. I like cheap. Are they easy to plumb in? I can't think how the hydraulic pressure wouldn't wander around the whole system but obviously it isn't an issue because they were the way to go for many years.

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My RRC rear axle has extra posts I welded to the axle so I could run extra calipers, this is road legal (certifiable) the other ways are to plumb in hilman imp master cylinders into the line to each wheel so the remote master is the normal brake master... you can get certification with this setup but its got to have removable levers so when your onroad no levers

The other way I've come up with is to go to a cable handbrake caliper like Izzuzu bighorn and we attach a handbrake cable to the caliper this is certifiable since we have a carden driveshaft handbrake on the landy

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"T" the rear line at the firewall run the lines up to where you want your levers and run a hilman imp master on each line then plumb them back to each wheel

You'll want to build some sort of frame to hold the levers and it will need good mounting as you haul on these LOL

My setup all I use is clutch master's running to a seperate line from there to the wheel

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Had back pain wake me the other morning at 3am after I gave up trying to get back to sleep I researched the gearing ratios.... set the whole lot up in excel so I could work out my diff gearing.... with the standard Commy auto and the divorced LT95 transfer case, I should in pull nicely in second on the auto with Range Rover 3.5 diffs and 35" tyres... kind of good as I have a couple of Range Rover diffs sitting here... but its ment there is no point in fitting the ARB to the Landy 4.7s I'm running at the moment since I'll have to change after I do the motor swop so fiddle brakes and arb will wait....

Going on a run this weekend, just a farm play day... but I've been warned there could be a river involved so I need the airbox sorted so had a bit of a go at it today....

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and the shot from inside the cab

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This will let me see if any water gets in.... just got to plumb it forward to the LD's air intake, I'm just going to use flexable shop ducting... after i've done the engine swop I'll set it up with a hard alloy air tube along the top of the trans tunnel

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Spent the day sorting out how I'm going to setup the transfercase so the PTO thing will work

Going to use the center diff lock actuator and the front drive shaft stub axle and flange to engage/disengage the PTO there is a couple of bits I"ll have to machine up, a new bearing mount that slips onto the end of the main shaft engaging the pto gear and will have a section of the diff lock spline sweated onto the end and and welded the original roller bearing will fit inside this spline and the front stub shaft will be machined to seat into the roller bearing and bolt to the outside housing with a adapter housing that also holds the new mainshaft bearing


housing is machined down

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had a bit of an idea of welding some alloy plate into the holes in the face then machining a mounting surface for a "sandwich" plate to mount this to the back of the commy trans but been rethinking this after trying to weld it :roll: done a bit of research and found I can change the AC frequency to pull the carp out of the casting then grind it away, keep doing this till I get enough clean metal to weld to

Really got me thinking about just adding a drive flange and remote mounting it with a UJ to the commy trans

Will make that decision when I've got the trans... still waiting on it to turn up....

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Great build and I'm really interested in what you come up with here too!!

I've got an LT 95 sitting and a couple of ZF gearboxes with 6.3 : 1 first gears. Rakeway remote was my first thought but it'll be good to see what you come up with.

Maybe an idea would be to just shift the top front shock mounts for now to improve the front end before doing something more drastic later. You could do it in an afternoon and have a way more balanced truck at the end of it.

I can sympathise with the back pain. Is an operation gonna work for you or is it coming better on it's own?

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Having driven logging skidders for years with swing axles... I don't mind driving it the way it is lol

I got the idea for the PTO off a thread here that Soren did using LT230 transfercases, I figured the LT95 was the for-runner for it so must be similar lol so the credit goes to him

The only clever bit is the cheat for the PTO drive gear... I'm not paying for broaching its too expensive LOL

As for my back had a cortisone injection about 3 weeks ago and I'm worse than ever my partner who is a nurse is convinced the only option is surgery... just a case of waiting for the specialist's appointment at the end of next month

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Right still busy winding down my business and shorting the new shed I'm moving to... they have doubled my painkillers again LOL I was complaining about keeping my head in order before well its a right royal struggle now.... keeping focus on what I'm doing lol even typing this my mind is wandering

Anyway I got to a point with cleaning and sorting the workshop yesterday that I needed to do something constructive so I started on the PTO conversion (still haven't got the Commy trans you'll laugh at this the guy who has it, has pinched a nerve in his spine so nether of us can lift it lol)

Started out by roughing out on the lathe the new bearing mount/shaft extension that was a bit of machining (no pic of this sorry) now this shaft extension will fit onto the internal end of the main(input shaft) using the roller bearing mount pin and the PTO spline the new larger bearing mounts in the middle of this and then the dog clutch spline off the end of the transfercase diff housing

DSCF2561.jpg

The spline from this end will be sweat fitted over the end and then welded on, before I do this I have to machine a bearing mount into the nose of this so I can add a "spigot bearing" to hold things inline when the gear is engaged

My only concern (other than machining a hardfaced and heat treated gear) is the other end of the dog gear (on the front axle stub shaft) has a shocking amount of backlash over 5mm.... this is factory and I haven't heard of failures due to this, but still.... almost got me tempted to sweat on an off cut of the spline above and grind some entry angles hmmm

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Well had an interesting discovery but sort of fits with what you pointed out Don "Made from what was readily available..." well I'm guessing cast iron was easier to get than steel... yep the final diff drive gear and the diff housing (including the spline) is made from cast iron.... I'm guessing the teeth on the spline have been induction hardened as the spark pattern was not noticeably different to steel, noticed it when I started machining the spline section

And the piece of steel I was planing on mounting this too I've machined it too far to cut the spline... so its now in the bin lol

Time for a redesign, looks like I'm going to have to spline my drive section....

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  • 3 weeks later...

Machined up a new extension shaft (from some random bar stock I picked up in a closing down sale) being that its an unknown grade of steel and it machined easily I decided to machine up a 4130 "plug" to be a tolerance fit onto the gearbox shaft where the end roller bearing ran and an interference fit into the extension shaft, yea well.... looks like it'll be third times the charm LOL I'm blaming my inside caliper, I'm guessing I must have caught it as I was bringing it out the end result is I'm 0.1mm too big LOL so I'm going to machine out the 4130 and make another... I've also coughed up for some telescopic gauges

I've still got to build a new spline cutter too, the depth of the dog splines is beyond my current tooling

hopefully something worth a pic of soon

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Well had an interesting discovery but sort of fits with what you pointed out Don "Made from what was readily available..." well I'm guessing cast iron was easier to get than steel... yep the final diff drive gear and the diff housing (including the spline) is made from cast iron.... I'm guessing the teeth on the spline have been induction hardened as the spark pattern was not noticeably different to steel, noticed it when I started machining the spline section

And the piece of steel I was planing on mounting this too I've machined it too far to cut the spline... so its now in the bin lol

Time for a redesign, looks like I'm going to have to spline my drive section....

If you had only asked LOL, I would have told you the centre diff was made from cast SG iron, because I recently machined the high gear splines off one to make a powered trailer PTO.

Have you considered the Maxidrive/X Eng method of making internal dog splines? Drill a series of holes of the correct PCD into a billet, then bore the billet out til you reach half way through the holes.End result is internal splines with the need for an annular undercut.The shape on the resulting spline lands don't really match the lands of the mainshaft gear dog teeth, but hell, if it was good enough for Maxi Drive Difflocks, it will be plenty good enough for a lower stressed PTO.

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