Thread: Stirlsilver's Disco Ute Project

Originally Posted by stirlsilver

So some more progress. I have a bit of a confusing problem with the speedo cable. I can't understand how it is that I have ended up with a male to male connection on the cable? The transfer case has a short approx 1m long run and I can't remember if there was an adaptor that I removed. Does anyone know what is required to connect this together? What's baffling is that the transfer case is out of the car so it should all connect together?!?

I think I'd get a whole new one made that ran from TC to binnacle (rather than buying a new one or a blue box version).

Originally Posted by stirlsilver

During the process of installing the front right hand brake line I felt the wheel wobble all over the place, and it was at that point that I realized that the wheel bearing was loose. In the course of sorting it out, I discovered some major dodgyness.

One of the drive flange bolts was over torqued, snapped and then GLUED back in place.



Whoever put this together in the past, didn't know what they were doing, they some how managed to stretch nearly all the 10.9 bolts on the drive flange. You can see on the photo below where the bolt stretched...


I eventually got to the culprit. The washer between the two lock nuts was cracked and had turned. The only way I can think that this happened was because the outside nut was WAY overtightened, crushing the washer?? I didn't remove the bearing, I just tightened everything up. It will need to come apart a little later anyway when I overhaul the hubs.

Damn scary

I think I'd be checking the other side.

The usual update again everyone. Though this one features some more SolidWorks stuff!

With the design of the air scoop, one thing that is important to me to to position it at a location where it will catch the air stream and thereby flow a lot more air through the intercooler cores. So in order to do that I had to do a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis. I traced out the profile of the car and used it to do a 2D analysis. I could have done it in 3D but it would have taken ages to solve and not provide that much more information.

Anyway, the GIF below is a nice summary of the results of how the pressure and flow changes as the car travels from 10km/h to 120km/h in 10km/h steps. If the image below doesn't animate you may need to click on it.



When looking at the results, keep in mind that what it shows is how the air moves around the centreline of the car.

Here are some clearer snap shots, first one has pressure shown by the colour and the second shows velocity.

40Km/h



60Km/h



80Km/h



100Km/h



120Km/h



So what the above shows is that a ute creates massive amounts of turbulence behind it (surprise, surprise) a long time ago I had come up with a concept of putting a sloping canopy over the tray which should sort that out nicely. Anyway, the second thing is that, there seems to be a nice spot to catch the air flow as it goes over the bonnet and before it separates due to the windshield.

The area I am talking about is here.


So now that I know where is a likely place to catch the air stream, the next thing for me to do is start trialing different scoop designs to see which generates the most pressure across the intercooler cores. That will be something I need to do next.

So on other news. As I mentioned in the previous post, I had the power steering pump re-built due to the squealing bearing. While I had the pump out, I wanted to sort out a proper hose connector for it, as I was using an aluminium air conditioning fitting which sort of worked (it had a slight weep). I took the pump to Pirtek only to discover that they didn't have any fittings to suit. The Range Rover pump has a SAE-9 fitting (I think that is what it was) but it needed to have a male thread and a female flare, which they didn't have...

I gave up on that and simply simply did some modifications the aluminium fitting I had and managed to get it to seal. It's not the right thing to do but I didn't have a choice.

The other item I worked on was trying to seal the gap between the intercooler thermo fans and the holes in the bonnet. A trip down to Clark Rubber and I ended up settling on the hot water insulation tubes which are nice and spongy and I think would be rated for high temperature exposure.


I simply glued them into a doughnut and I was surprised how well it worked!





A bit more road tuning was done on the car, I have shown an extract of the engine log below where I got the manifold pressure to 140kPa (about 6psi of boost). This was achieved at 2500rpm and the throttle only partly open (I haven't dared put my foot to the floor yet).


All in all going well, the air temperature in the manifold didn't go beyond 44degC, but that was just on short runs. It will be interesting to see how well the intercoolers work under constant turbo boost.

Next step is driving the car to get the LPG hooked up (I go through a 9Kg bottle in no time!). You might spot me on the road this week if you live in the NSW hills area