Thread: "Leyland" Land Rover Question plus others

You can buy the bolts and brackets on line or from most landrover wreckers and Leyland was the company that made landrovers company name has changed several times but the brand stays just keeps going

Originally Posted by pfillery

Just curious...noticed my series 3 1975 model has chrome Leyland badges on the doors and above the radiator on the front. Do all of them have these or were some built by Leyland and others by Land Rover? Silly question but I'm curious.

Also can someone please post a picture of what the spare wheel retaining bolts and clamps for a series 3 bonnet look like? I have the raised bit on my bonnet with the bolt holes and the rubber supports but no bracket. I did look at one last week but can't remember what it looked like. Also if you know the thread size and length of the bolts needed to fit the tyre on there this would be appreciated, makes it easier than taking the bonnet to Bunnings or a bolt wholesaler! Or are the "kits" available complete?

I worked at Leyland Truck & Bus, Brisbane, at that time and any LR's sold through the Brisbane retail operation were registered as a Make:- Leyland, Model:- Land Rover. RR's similarly. Leyland were the owners of Rover at the time. Land Rovers were assembled in Australia at the Pressed Metal plant at Enfield in Sydney, also owned by Leyland.

Leyland oz company that built series from kits from Solihull
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Brett

In 1968 the British Government in attempt to rescue the ailing British motor industries acquired and merged most independent marques. This included BMC (makers of MG, Austin and Morris and recently merged with Jaguar Damler) Rover, Alvis, Trimuph and Leyland (who made trucks and busses and conglomerate was called British Leyland Motor Corporation (BLMC) when the Series three came out Leyland Australia had a want to fix it's name to everything so all it's marques had the Leyland badge on it. Land Rover continued to be made in the same factories and apart from discontinuing the manufacture of Daimler buses and Alvis cars, not much else changed. There was very little in the way of benefiting from ecconomies of scale. e.g. both Rover/Land Rover and Triumph were manufacturing small volumes of similar sized V8 engines. However there was a massive bureaucratising of the whole corporation and instead of rescuing the industry it almost killed it.

Originally Posted by Brian Hjelm

<snip> Land Rovers were assembled in Australia at the Pressed Metal plant at Enfield in Sydney, also owned by Leyland.

Are you sure that the PMC factory was Leyland owned? IMHO PMC was a LNC Industries owned subsidiary that made bus bodies and assembled vehicles under contract for Rover (subsequently BLMC) and Peugeot. Leyland Australia had it's own plant (ex BMC) at Zetland which made the Morris, Austin and Leyland marque cars.

Originally Posted by Lotz-A-Landies

Are you sure that the PMC factory was Leyland owned?

I'm sure JRA had some interest in PMC so it's quite likely that carried over from the Leyland days.

After the two big bus crashes on the NSW north coast, JRA had a bus from PMC partially filled with concrete to roll over for seat belt testing.

I was always under the impression that Leyland Australia owned it. Leyland staff worked in sales and admin at least. It was an awfully inefficient organisation. When I took on responsibility for the Qld/ Northern NSW wholesale sales and distribution in July 1973, one of the first documents I saw from Pressed Metal was a build programme for LR's for August giving off-line availability dates. Coming from GM-H where off-line dates were pretty well gospel with few deviations, usually caused by short supply from vendors, I accepted these dates and commenced allocations to dealers. Surprise, surprise, I eventually added six weeks to PMC's off-line dates and was still getting caught out, particularly with 109/6/station wagons whose availability was possibly determined by PMC staff studying the entrails of a chicken in a graveyard at midnight.

Until the P76 disaster left BMC dealers without a volume car, and the car people were merged with Truck and Bus, Leyland Motor Corporation of Australia (proper name for Truck and Bus) was an independent company reporting directly to London, with our own Australian board of directors. BLMC was the Zetland shambles. Come the P76 debacle and David Maple, boy wonder, the operations were merged to give some semblance of profit (earned by Truck & Bus) across the board. Maple, of course, sold the place up, patted himself on the back, returned to England to tell all there what a good operator he was and what a great job he did.

In the early days of Grenville Motors* assembly PMC was definately a division of LNC** so the transfer of assembly from Grenville's Australia Street Camperdown assembly factory to the PMC bus body factory at Enfield was a simple transfer of the operations from the LNC motor dealers division to the PMC-LNC division. It should be noted that Rover at that time had it's Austrailian head office in Melbourne, but soon transferred to an Office in Sydney to oversee the Land Rover production at PMC.

PMC was also assembling Peugeot cars (distributed by LNC) in Sydney at the same time as they were assembling Land Rover for distribution originally by Grenville's and later by LT&B. I can not see that Peugeot would have their cars assembled by Leyland, but can accept that they would continue with a licenced assembly arrangement with LNC. Leyland would likely have continued to maintain a production office for the PMC factory in the same manner that Rover Australia maintained one. Someone else will have to confirm whether the Jaguar Rover Australia (JRA) factory at Moorebank was a JRA company operation or something else.

Names under the LNC banner were LNC Industries, Lannock Motors (VW & Subaru), York motors (former BMC marques), Larke Hoskins (BMC), Yorkstar Motors (Mercedes Benz), Grenville Motors (Rover and Land Rover)

PMC Bus manufacturing was combined with Custom Coaches from Smithfield and eventually moved to Adelaide under the Austral Pacific Group (which is currently listed as Austral Limited). I believe that APG was the successor to LNC Industries .


* Check the ID badge of any Grenville distributed 80" and you will see the name Larke Neave and Carter. = LNC
**It may be true that the UK company Pressed Metals was within the BLMC monster, but that in the 1940s or '50s LNC licenced the use of the PMC name for their bus body factory.