Thread: Land rover mechano set

Heres a clip from this arvo's fun working on my county, gota love how defenders are built like a big Mechano set
Unfortunatly by the time we lifted the firewall and windscreen off it there wasnt enough light to get a decent sequence of shots.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k94dIdkC9J4"]YouTube - Land Rover Mechano[/ame]

and a few pics...
How it started this morning




Partly stripped







Tomorow should hopefull see the rest of the body come off the chassis, just gota work out how the back section is bolts down.

Well we started around 11am and had it all done by 5pm, i did most of the work by myself with my mate helping mainly with lifting the panels off, i suggest you get 2-3 friends to helf lift the firewall off if you leave it as intact as i did, it was friggin heavy like that with just 2 of us.

Start with the bonnet, tip it up high enough so the mounts slip out of the plastic guide things on the firewall, then the nose cone theres 2-3 bolts either side holding it to the gaurds and a few screws along the top, then remove the radiator support panel,make sure you take not of how many spacers were in there, if you have A/C it will be a little more interesting but i pulled all this out last time i did the front end swap, this panel has a few bolts probobly removed the top ones when you did the nose cone and then 2 at the bottom to the chassis. its probobly easiest to pull the radiator now and then onto the guards, leave the inner gaurds attached to the outer guards you can also leave the headlights and blinkers in there positions and just unplug them from the wiring the runs up between the inner and outer guard(you will need to remove the flares to get to this they have little plugs that the centre punches out of to remove them) once the wiring is off, strip of anything attached to the inner gaurds under bonnet, undo the 4 bolts at the back of the guards holding them to the firewall and the 1 at the top if its a county, theres 2 bolts holding the inner guard on at the bottom near the radiator and one at the back on the chassis to firewall mount brackets, there are also a few screws you need to under from under the inner guard, the guard will need to be lifted up over the shock towers and should lift off pretty easily. remove all the floor and tranny tunnel peices, theats all pretty easy.

Then on the firewall, its a big job... I have removed all my A/C stuff previously, no heater box etc so i didnt have to worry about any of that, i pulled the all the plugs out at the firewall to chassis side of the wiring, also undone any cable ties etc holding wiring to the firewall that was attached to the chassis, then removed the brake lines from the bottom of the proportion valved(in a county its attached tot he firewall not sure about how a defenders brakes setup is) for the clutch, i removed the hose from the slave cyl to the firewall. With steering column i undone the splines and slipped out the shaft while we lifted the firewall off, i think a defender setup is different. I also removed the speed drive cable from the cluster and pulled it through and left it with the gearbox, removed various vacum lines for the booster and other things, removed all the lines to the carbon pot etc and throttle linkages. After we removed the windscreen, it was a bitch to get out, after undoing from the roof and removed the roof lining i thought we may have been able to fold it forward, but the rear view mirrow mount kept catching on the roof, we had to undo most of the roof and undo the hinges to get it out - if i did it again i would start with the roof then undo the hinges you might be able to get it out without removing the roof, just the b pillar roof mounts. the bottom of the firewall is held with 2 large bolts on the outsides, there are also 2 bolts that hold the side rails on to the firewall, then there are 2 firewall to chassis mounts, on mine they had 2 bolts with a flat blade screw head on the floor pan side, the bottom one is visable but the top one was covered by the cardboard trim pieces at the top of the foot well. Once these were out we just lifted it out, a hoist and sling would have been a better option !

I may have missed some parts... thats just off the top of my head, and no doubt a defender will have a few differences that i dont know about.