Some assembly required

Alright, well the beast project is in full swing and significant headway has been made. A few weeks ago, I finally acquired some cheap headers from a guy I found on KSL.com. After mounting those up and making a few other last minute tweaks and modifications, she was ready to fire up. After a lot of chugging and coughing, I discovered I had transposed two plug wires. Once I had corrected that error, I advanced the timing a bit and she fired right up. She ran a little hot at first, but most likely because the coolant system wasn’t fully primed to begin with. After a good 5 minutes of letting it run and checking all the ins and outs, she was idling beautifully (albeit loudly, no exhaust system yet) and working like a champ. After the engine was buttoned up it was time to move on to other things. One reason for getting the engine set was to verify how much space I had to work with for extending the firewall out a bit. Apparently people in 1955 who drove these Land Rovers were quite short little people. As you can see in the picture, I have removed the firewall and much of the floorboard. I intend to move the firewall out to improve legroom, while lowering the floorboards a bit to fit some actual seats (instead of the little pad of foam they used to call a seat. Without having all the steel, I am unable to progress significantly on the firewall portion, so I moved on to the rear suspension. Really all I needed to do was extent the rear tie bars to match the length of the inverted leaf springs. However, after seeing what this suspension design was capable of, I became particularly interested in doing the same to the front. And since I had plenty of heavy wall tubing to make more tie bars, I decided to use the existing tie bars for the front suspension and make new ones for the rear. A little fab work, and the new tie bars were ready to go. Once swapping them in (actually more of a pain than I thought it’d be, mostly due to the height of the vehicle and the lack of good anchor points for a high lift jack) the rear suspension was nearly complete, and already remarkably flexible. All that is left to do is modify the rear shackles to work properly at extreme angles, and paint it all up to look pretty. What’s really neat is that even with the stock 30” tires I have this thing sitting on for the moment, I still have a departure angle greater than 90 degrees (meaning that if I try to back into a wall, the tires will be the first and only thing to touch the wall, making it much easier to navigate my way up said wall). From here, I did a little cleanup work and cut off some of the stock brackets left on the frame, and basically cleaned things up a bit. Then it was time to move on to the front, although designing anchor points for the tie rods to connect to the frame is going to be a little difficult due to the space constraints in the front end. In the rear it was easy, there is nothing to contend with back there, no exhaust, no engine, no transmission and just the tail end of the transfer case. In the front I have all of these things to contend with, as well as the fact that the front driveline enters off center, meaning if I am not careful with the design it’ll interfere with suspension linkage. So I’ll have to take my time and model up the whole frame and axle assemblies carefully to verify that what I am doing is really going to solve my problems without creating others. Since I can’t make a great deal of headway on the front suspension, I decided to move on to the steering system. It was pretty obvious that the stock steering column for the Land Rover wasn’t going to work, so I was left to find a way to get some other steering column in their. Remaking the firewall pretty much gives me full say so on what I can and can’t do, but there are still some notions of price effectiveness and practicality. If money weren’t an issue, I’d either build one from scratch or have one built for me. Nevertheless, this is a budget build (at least right now it is) so I decided to use a chevy steering column I had kicking around. It was a column shift for an automatic transmission, and has no tilt, but if I build it properly, both of those things should prove to be no problem at all. After tearing down the whole thing, I discovered that the shaft lengths and indeed the entire column length is adjustable, provided you cut the few tack welds holding it in place. A little grinding, a bit of pounding with a hammer, and I was easily able to trim 12 inches off the length. Now all I have to do is build the firewall in around it and I’m set for that bit. That more or less covers what I have done already, now here are some of the things I’ll be doing shortly. Once I get the steel I need for the firewall, I’ll build that in as well as the floor boards. Tonight, I’ll be doing a little shopping to get two heim joints and some paint so I can modify the rear shackles and start cleaning up the rear suspension for paint. One other thing I’ll need to iron out and plan for is the hydraulic clutch kit. It should be fairly easy, but is still something I need to take into consideration while building the firewall and subsequently building a petal tree. Also, if I have sufficient time (which means I probably won’t get to it tonight) I’ll be making some measurements of the front axle and then removing it so I can start planning in the front suspension and building a truss for the front axle (think of it as a massive reinforcement, as well as a convenient place to connect suspension linkage). The front will be a 4 link system just like the rear, only instead of using inverted leaf springs I’ll be using professional coilover shocks with a dual rate spring setup. After researching these a little, I regretted having already build the rear suspension and I think I’ll probably end up going this route at some point, though since the rear is already build and assembled, I’ll try it out (especially since the coilovers are so expensive). Even with the leaf spring system in place, I should be pushing about 20 inches of articulation in the rear. The front should be a little more at around 28 inches (though I may have to cut that back via limiting straps for driveline considerations). In the end she should be very flexy. My goal is to have approach and departure angles greater than 90 degrees, and be running 44” tires (which I have already taken into account for the suspension and body clearances). And I should be at about 115” for a wheelbase when all is said and done, though it’ll be somewhat adjustable by +/- 6 inches or so. Before too long though, this project is going to stop being a cheap tinker toy and evolve into an expensive hobby. After the suspension is all buttoned in and ready to go, I need to start buying things like Hummer Beadlock Wheels, 44” tires, Front and Rear Lockers, Front and Rear Ring and Pinion Kits, Propane Conversion Hardware, and so on. Still, that is a ways away yet, and for now I only need cash flow in the 100 per month range (for about the next 5 months or so, then things get all weird and I need lump sums of several hundreds). Anyway, I’ll be sure to post again soon, hopefully with some pictures showing a bit of new paint so she’s not so ugly!