Thread: Lazarus 2A Ambulance

Hello All,

I had a bit of a clean-up around Lazarus and bagged and tagged various nuts bolts and other miscellaneous detritus.

I then embarked on removing the multitudinous variety and numbers of nuts and bolts that hold the seat box down.

The lowest pillar captive nuts on both sides of the seat box were nasty little sods. The passenger side one broke off. The driver's side due to its proximity to the build up gunk at the bottom of the pillar where it holds moisture was rusty. Soon as I put some pressure on the bolt head the rusty "captive" part of the scheme decided to liberate itself. Of course there is no way to access the now non-captive part. So I had to drill into the head and persuade the bolt head off with a cold chisel and engineer's hammer.

The lower seat belt anchor bolts were fun too.

Tomorrow - off comes the seat box - it seems to be glued onto the frame of the body. Once the seat box is off it will give me access to the gear box and I will get that ready to be lifted out.

Next... remove the steering column and then undo all the bolts to remove the top windscreen bolts so the bulkhead can come out as well. The bulkhead has more holes than Swiss cheese. Actually I think Swiss cheese is more structurally sound than Lazarus' current rusty bulkhead. Well, it is really part-there-of . I do have a second hand bulkhead to replace it with.

Kind regards
Lionel

A useful tip for these difficult bolts and nuts is to think ahead and soak daily in penetrating oil for at least a week before trying to undo them. Alas, this is not always practical.

Originally Posted by JDNSW

A useful tip for these difficult bolts and nuts is to think ahead and soak daily in penetrating oil for at least a week before trying to undo them. Alas, this is not always practical.

Hello John,

Thanks for the tip - John.

As things worked out the face of the pillar where the nut broke off had actually sheared or rusted off. If I needed to I could have easily have had access to the captive nut area with a set of vise-grips. However, the face of the pillar where the captive nut decided to liberate itself is in pristine condition - so there was no vise-grip access. It was just pre-ordained to be stubborn and cantankerous.

Kind regards
Lionel

Hello All,

I got a bit of a surprise yesterday when I took the engine out of Lazarus. When I was underneath the vehicle I checked out the gear box cross member. It was unmodified. I have a number of ex-Army Series III and they all have the modified bolted on gear box cross member. This allows the gear box to lowered down to remove it.

Not that it made much difference that this modifcation had not been done on Lazarus, I was still going to remove the seat box anyway.

Does anyone have a Series 2A ex-Army Land Rover which had the gear box cross member modified in service? Or was it just the Series IIIs?

Kind regards
Lionel

Not exactly an example of a modified one - my ex-army 2a does not have the modified crossmember. And while I can't claim to have surveyed a representative selection of 2as, I have never seen one that was modified in service, which does suggest that the mod was restricted to Series 3.

I had a SWB Series 11A GS (1964) which had the modified gearbox cross member. Whether this was modified in service or after, I don't know.

My current 11A Gunbuggy (1963) does not.

Hello All,

Thanks Numpty and John for the information about 2A gear box cross members.

I took a change in tack - I started work on Lazarus early this morning. I have packed my tools up at 9:30 am because it just got too hot in the paddock where Lazarus is parked.

What have I achieved with hours of work? I have the seat box off. Apparently due to the wide and flat floor of the ambulance module there is extra reinforcement at the back of the seat box. Two lengths of "Top Hat" channel held by four screws. This channel goes from the front face of the seat box - all the way underneath seat box and extends under the ambulance module by 6 centimetres. There are four straight slot mushroom heads with hex nuts. I am not sure what size the hex nuts were. A 1/2 inch socket was too large. The immediate size in my the socket sets smaller than 1/2 inch is 7/16 and it was too small. I tried my Metric set and the nut was in between 11 - 12 mm. So out came the vise-grips to hold the nuts.

I will be replacing these screws with hex head bolts and hex nuts.

The other thing was the caulking the manufacturers used. Grey in colour and in the years since the body was made, the stuff was still strong. I had to cut through the caulking and scrape it off both faces of the metal with a hacksaw blade. I tried to just cut down the centre of the bead; however, soon as the caulking touched itself it regained tack strength. It also sticks to anything that it comes in contact with it.


Once the seat box was off I checked the chassis for rust and I did not find any nasty surprises. Fingers crossed that more closer inspection proves otherwise.

Now for the rusty bulkhead to come off sometime this afternoon - when it gets cooler.

Kind regards
Lionel

Likely the nut is Whitworth. For this vehicle a set of Whitworth spanners is very necessary. While the Series 2 introduced UNF and AF spanners, there are a lot of bits inherited from Series 1 using Whitworth or BSF (some continued to the end of S3 production).

Good quality Whitworth spanners can often be found for almost nothing in Op Shops and garage sales, or, if you are really feeling flu$h, can be ordered in from any respectable tool supplier.