Somehow I forgot to take any pictures of it all nice and shiny after painting my rust repairs, but it’s all back together again save a few floorboard screws which I hope to get to this evening. Drove her to lunch today as well!
Man, it’s a bumpy ride. I’m going to have to check the tire pressure, and maybe invest in some parabolic springs.
Well, the rust was pretty bad so I had to do something about it. The sad thing is someone had already attempted to patch it with body filler but they didn’t remove the rust!
I’m going to weld the patch in tomorrow with fresh light and maybe a hand to get everything lined up nicely. She’ll be good as new soon.
Shipfitters disease, also referred to as “might as well” syndrome, or “while you are in there” syndrome has set in.
I had to remove one of the fenders and the floorboards to get access to the clutch master and slave cylinders. Due to being rather busy and slow delivery of parts I am finally in a position to put them back on, except I could not resist the urge to cleanup any visible rust. This lead to a fair amount of work and culminated in poking a nice sized hole into the passenger footwell which forced my hand to pull the other fender to properly patch the footwell and give the passenger side the same rust retarding treatment. Of course removing that fender makes it easy to remove the battery box and air filter bracket, replace the fan cowl (thereby painting the fan too) and the fan belt “while I’m in there“. Fun stuff
I’m reading a lovely book by James Taylor entitled “Land Rover Series II and IIA Specification Guide”. In case you are thinking thats a rather dry sounding title, think again. Besides giving detailed information about (seemingly) each and ever little change to the Series II and IIA line, it also gives lots of information about the vehicles themselves.
I got the book because I wanted to be able to tell what was stock and what was not, but it seems there can be a number of legitimate reasons why one’s vehicle might have come off the assembly line with a different configuration that expected so I’m not sure what to make of the differences. For example my truck has the battery under the hood, but this was supposedly moved to under the seat box at Suffix A back in 1961!
What’s this suffix A you say? Aah, well that’s what I meant to post about before going off on a tangent. The book gives a great breakdown of each VIN number ever produced (although you can get a concise version online at Calvin). On a Series IIA, the first three digits describe the vehicle type, the following 5 digits are the serial number, and then there is a final character (the suffix) which marks points at which they made changes to the vehicle design to help dealerships keep track for maintenance.
Decoding my VIN number (24411869B) shows
| 244 | Model: Land Rover, Series IIA |
|---|---|
| Body type: Basic or Station wagon | |
| Wheel base: 88in | |
| Engine: petrol | |
| Model years: 1962-1971 | |
| Destination: Export, left-hand drive (LHD) | |
| 11869 | Serial number |
| B | Design: One significant design modification |
| Suffix used from March 1963 till April 1966 |
Interesting stuff. So for example I now know my truck should have the heavy duty 9.5″ clutch.
Furthermore, you can learn more about the vehicle based on engine numbers, transmission numbers and so forth. I’ll use this post to list the numbers I have recorded so far.
Engine: 251166541F
Cylinder head: 525183
Exhaust manifold: 598473
Carburator (not stock): Weber Tipo 34 ICH 2-350 1K
I haven’t posted about this because I had no idea it would take so long. The clutch was leaking and started to fail so I decided rebuild both the master cylinder and the slave cylinder. To access the master cylinder it’s easiest to removed the left front wing, and to access the slave it helps to remove the tunnel cover which means removing the floor boards, so they are out too.
Due to poor planning on my part, and bad timing it’s been like this for a few weeks now. I had finally gotten around to ordering a cylinder hone online since I couldn’t find one locally, but it will only arrive next week so this weekend I couldn’t work on it. I’m missing out on primo top down driving weather.
Anyhow, here is how she looks right now…
I really don’t need a lock on the fuel filler cap, and the hasp rattles unless locked (or secured somehow) so I decided to remove the hasp/lock. It meant removing the inside trim covering the filler neck to get access to the nuts behind the screws which turned out to be a little more effort than I expected, but otherwise it was another quick and easy mod.
Within days of getting her, my 10 year old managed to break off the knob of one of the windshield vent controls. She swears she didn’t use excessive force, but I fail to see how she could have broken it without really lifting hard (without sliding the mechanism out of the catch slot). Anyhow, fixed with a used replacement.
She’s in great shape overall, but being a Land Rover she has a few things that need attention. One that I really wanted to fix because it was both easy and a much needed feature was the handbrake. I didn’t take any before pictures but the ratcheting mechanism had rusted/seized so it wouldn’t stay up. I decided to remove and refurbish the entire assembly and check the shoes in the drum which were fine. Here is a short video showing it in action.
Pictures below…
The old girl gave us a hand doing a little earth day cleanup today. Someone dumped a TV at the entrance to the retention pond/recreation area down the street.
Greg (the previous owner) was kind enough to drive her down to me from Vermont on April 15/16th as he was headed this way anyway. We had originally planned to meet half way and I wish we had, but I lived vicariously through him as he took pictures along the way with his iphone (geotagged) and sent them to me.
Anyway, using this post to figure out the best way to add photos to these posts.
