Starting the engine – a tale of disappointment and woe, but with a happy ending

Hi All,

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last update and things have certainly progressed a fair bit since then.

First off, within a couple of days of my last post I did indeed get the water problem sorted out. Liam and I were chatting about the problem as he’d come over to collect me on the way to a conference and he suggested using some long stud bolts to mount the header tank in the normal place but effectively lifting up an inch or so therefore clearing the oil pipe.

I left my brain to think about this for a day or two in the background and as is usually the case it let me know when it had an answer. A quick trip to B&Q and I bought a length of 25mm square box section and a length of 3mm thick 15mm wide steel bar. The box section is now firmly bolted completely along the top of the radiator using the M8 mounts welded into the shoulders. The header tank is held onto the bar by one of these bolts. The other end of the header tanks is bolted to a length of bar (about 8cm long) that in turn is bolted to the bracket supplied by NCF. If I could weld I would have just removed the original bar on the bracket and welded on a new length, but I can’t so I’ve just bolted it very very firmly instead! At some point I need to take these off and paint them but for now it’s on there as I’ve got a few more things that I want to bolt to that long bar – but more about that later on.

I plumbed the radiator to the header tank with the original large pipes and some new lengths of pipe for the smaller connections. Ethan then helped me fill it with a 30% mix of water and anti-freeze – as we know all 3 year olds love playing with water and he’s no exception! He and I had also been to Halfords earlier in the day and bought fresh engine Oil and also new transmission oil so we got these topped up – though the auto box oil level will have to be checked after I’ve done a mile or so to make sure that the level is still good.

Earlier on that day I had got the new battery cables fitted and reconnected the battery. The positive was just the right length to come up the O/S of the engine, across the top of the engine bay (along the top lip of the windscreen gully) and then onto the battery. The negative was a little trickier but it’s now bolted to a new bolt through an eye on the chassis just underneath the bulkhead – in fact it you look where the starter’s chassis ground is I’ve used the same eye but on the near side. I also bolted the eye that’s halfway up the negative cable to one of the protruding bolts on the bulkhead and that’s given me a really nice neat but electrically sound connection there as well.

After Ethan and Oscar had gone to bed for the night I eagerly informed Ellie the time had come and I was going to start the engine. I reconnected the fuel pump cable, poured in a few litres of petrol from a jerry can and dragged her out to watch as I gingerly turned the key and the engine turned over. And Over. And Over. And refused to start.

After a lot of trying it would run for a few seconds but incredibly poorly and then just stop. At one point it ran for about 10 secs but the RPM’s shot up to about 3000 and I started getting very worried so killed it.

Ellie could sense the disappointment and quietly left me to it. I checked all the HT leads and the coil and as far as I could see was getting a good spark using the old test of holding the lead close to the block. Even so I tried fitting the new HT leads and checked it all over again and again but the damn thing just wouldn’t run.

Calling it a day I covered up the car, dumped everything in the garage, closed the door and stomped in side.

I was so p**ssed off by the whole thing I couldn’t face looking at the next day so just left it. I spoke to Maltings who suggested checking that I hadn’t fitted the filter the wrong way round and a few other bits but none of this seemed to be the case.

In desperation I stopped off at the petrol station on the way home from work and put 10liters of petrol into a jerry can and brought it home. Poured it into the tank……..and it started and ran beautifully on the first turn!

Having spoken to a few people since it would seem that you need at least 6 or 7 litres in the tank just to get the pump wet so until I added in a load more it was never going to work – bloody typical – literally the simplest most obvious issue that I just didn’t even think of at the time!

The only slight issue was just that the side of the battery was nudging the throttle cable slightly and causing it to push open a bit, but I’m fitting an Optima and this is about 1.5cm smaller so I’ve now made up a smaller bracket and this should solve the problem by allowing me to locate the battery slightly further away.

All in all I was very very pleased that evening. Now I knew the engine worked I could get on with the rest of the job – and first job was to disconnected the fuel pump wiring loom (thereby disabling the engine, for a while anyway) so I could get on with putting in the repair panels and getting it ready for the road.

Getting the engine working again

I’m really hoping to get the engine started again soon as this will be a bit boost, but theres a long way to go.

Obviously the radiator is back in now and all the oil cooler pipes connected, so I’ll soon be able to fill it back up with engine and transmission oil. Unfortunately until I sort the header tank problem I can’t put water in, so obviously I won’t actually be able to get it going yet.

The coil pack is now mounted up, but one big job thats unique to using a V8 is that the battery to starter cable is nowhere near long enough. On a diesel the cable runs down and under the engine, but on the petrol the starter is on the same side as the battery so the cable won’t reach when you move the battery to the other side.

I had dropped the original battery-Starter and battery to body cables at a local auto-electrician to have them extended and he started work on them but after a couple of weeks he stopped returning my calls so that left me a) without cables and b) bloody annoyed at the thieving git.

Still, it did make me rethink the problem and I’ve now bought the diesel version of the starter cable instead. This is much longer and it turns out this is much heavier duty than the petrol version so there won’t be a problem with drawing too much current. If you were going the other way (i.e. trying to use a petrol cable on a diesel) it’s very likely the cable would burn out and possibly cause an electrical fire so definitely DON’T do that!

Whilst I had the car up on the stands replacing the suspension the other day I fitted the new cable and routed it up the side of the engine and across the top of the engine bay. Make sure you don’t run it such that it will rest against the block as it will melt and that would be yet another cause of a fire. I’m going to order some large rubber coated P clips from Car Builder Solutions (who I’ve been buying a lot of bits and bobs from) and use these as cable clips to hold it in place so it doesn’t wave around.

Next problem is the main power cable that goes from the battery to the fuse-box. I’ve made up a bracket from a strip of metal and relocated the fuse box to against the bulkhead but even so the existing cable is too short. I found a much more reputable auto electrician in hull and popped round there today at lunch and they have supplied me with a 1 meter length of suitable cable in return for a shiny £1. I’ll offer the loom up tomorrow and then I can work out how long i need and splice the new length into the middle of the existing cable. To do this I’ll snip the cable in two and then solder in the extension length and then coat the joins in heat shrink to stop any chance of short circuits. Don’t forget to slide the heatshrink onto the wire before you finish the soldering though or you’ll have to try and pass it over the connector at the end and that probably wont fit.

To make the heatshrink…errrr….shink…. I always waft a a paint stripping heat gun over it – some people use a lighter or the tip of the soldering iron, but the heat gun makes sure you don’t melt the insulation so is a better option.

Once i’ve got that cable made up I can then bolt the battery into place, connect the various ground points in the wiring looms to the body and chassis and at that point the car should be able to light up again – it will be interesting to see how many error lights I get on the dashboard!

Before I can start the engine (once I’ve solved the water tank problem above) I’ll need to temporarily plug the main body to rear wiring loom back in and connect up the fuel pump and sender harness, but this is an easy job so will only take a few seconds.

If I can just solve the water problem then I’ might be able to start it fairly soon which will be great.

In the meantime I have some decisions to make about Wheels and seats – I had settled on black 8 spoke steel wheels, but at the LRO show I found a company doing anthracite modular steel wheels which looked really cool so I think i’ll probably go for those.

Seat wise I’m now set on getting Corbeau Targa seats and I’m hoping to get these ordered and delivered to work next week. Ridiculously the reason I haven’t ordered them this week – my main car (the G4 Discovery) has blown a head gasket (as it’s a V8 it has 2) so it’s at the garage being repaired and the tiny tiny tiny rental I’ve got only just has room for me in it, definitely not a set of replacement seats as well!

It should hopefully be back next week though so I can then order the seats, get them home and start making up some brackets to fit them.

Starting work on the Engine Bay

Now I had the body and bonnet back on the chassis I offered up the new radiator and its a perfect fit. The only thing that’s a little tight is 1 of the terminals on the thermostat as it’s a little too close to a mount on the chassis so I think I’ll lift it up slightly and pack it up with some large washers to lift the whole rad up.

I replaced all the o rings in the oil lines with new ones – I’m told these are quite different from the O rings you can buy from motor factors etc. so I did buy official LR ones (LR Part number ESR1594L ) – even though they did cost £2 each! I also had to buy 4 Oil adaptors to connect the hoses to the radiators – again official LR ones, but these are quite cheap so worth getting – LR Part number ESR1262.

To hold the radiator in place, NCF supply 2 mounting brackets to bolt to the radiator and then screw to the suspension turrets. The one on the passenger side is a straight piece of metal, whilst the one on the drivers side has a bar welded on to help support the expansion tank – more on that later.

When the kit arrived I had test fitted the brackets using the original radiator and it was obvious that they wouldn’t quite fit over the studs on the edge of the radiator because its a little larger than the TDI version. When I talked to Jon @ Brunel he suggested leaving the shoulders blank so I could then drill the mounting holes in the right place. He also welded 2 M10 nuts into the top shoulders so I can hang bits off there as well.

On the passengers side a quick 8mm hole drilled through the rad’s shoulder and another 3.5mm one into the top of the suspension turret and it bolted and self tapping screwed straight on.

Nick suggests that you bolt the power steering reservoir to the top of the radiator and find a smaller water washer bottle and bolt this to that bracket, but the pipes aren’t long enough to mount the reservoir to the top of the radiator so I’ve had to mount it to the bracket instead and I’ll have to find somewhere else to fit the washer bottle.

I then realised that the ignition coil will also need mounting somewhere – again something you don’t have on the diesel engine – so I’ve bolted this to the bracket too. I’ll get some pics on here once the sun comes up again!  Actually, when I looked at the coil pack it was disgustingly oily so I actually stripped it apart (making a note of all the connections) and then cleaned it with some degreaser – ok , petrol on a rag – and then reassembled it. It looks a lot better now and hopefully will have resolved any ignition issues that might have cropped up from all the gunge.

I’ve got new performance HT leads to fit and also a waterproofing kit for the coil and distributor but I’m leaving this until at the end so I don’t introduce any problems – once I know the engine works again, I’ll start messing about with the upgrades!

The drivers side radiator bracket is much more tricky as I can’t mount the header tank in the right place (to use the bar that’s welded to the bracket) as it fouls on the top oil cooler pipe. I don’t know if this is because the rad is wider than on a TDI, or because the pipe is different, but there is no way it’s going to fit.

I’m going to have another look in daylight, but I suspect I’m going to have to source a replacement header tank, so I’ll have to do a bit of hunting. Brunel do custom designed tanks so I’ll probably have a chat with Jon and see if we can work out some sort of replacement. For now I’ve left it but I’ll ponder and see what I can work out.

Replacing the suspension on a Discovery 1

One quick job I had to finish before I carried on with work on the new body was replacing all the suspension springs. I tackled this over a couple of days doing the rear ones first and the front ones later on.

The process is basically the same for front and rear, the main difference being that you don’t have to remove the damper at the rear. I’ll detail the front one as it’s the longer of the 2 jobs

Don’t forget to “chock” the wheels that are staying on the floor before jacking as you don’t want the thing rolling off the stands or jack

Quite an easy job – trick is to jack up the front using a jack under the axle, remove the wheels and then support the chassis on axle stands and lower the axle down until it stops descending. Lock the jack here so it’s just supporting the weight. At this point you can then release the bolt holding the top of the gas damper and unbolt and remove the suspension turret (if you’re replacing it)

Then lower the jack down until the axle bottoms out. If you’re lucky this will release the springs, but in my case I had to use 3 spring compressors (from Machine Mart) to squash them slightly before removing them.

Once this was off i removed the turret mounting ring and also the spring seat and then sanded back the rust and painted it all in hammerite. I didn’t do the full axle or hockey sticks, but I’m planning on replacing these later and possibly upgrading the diffs to locking diffs so I’ll do these later on.

I then replaced the turrent mounting ring with a new one, and also the spring seat at the bottom as both were very crusty and are pretty inexpensive so definitely worth replacing.

Finally I compressed the new Britpart springs and offered them back up. A useful tip is to put the mounting ring up first and hold it in place with  a couple of nuts (don’t fit the turret yet!). Then offer up the spring and finally slip the seat in underneath – this way you don’t have to squash the spring as much.

Then bolt the spring seat in place before jacking the axle back up a little to seat the spring in. You can then drop the damper down through the ring and refit and bolt on the turret. I actually replaced these as again they are pretty cheap – chances are if you are upgrading your suspension you will probably be replacing these with competition turrets anyway, but for now I’ve just replaced with standard items.

Finally you can then refit the wheels then jack the axle back up until the car lifts off the axle stands, remove these and lower the whole thing back down.

NCF Sahara Update

Well, the body work is back and looks AMAZING! It took the company van (for the front section), a rental van with a flat bed back (to carry the main body), a Rover 200 (to carry the doors), 4 guys from work, 8 straps, 5 blankets and a free lunch for all afterwards.

With a lot of heavy listing It dropped on fairly easily – but then you would hope so considering it’s the second time it’s been fitted.

After standing around looking at it (ok, and a bit of caressing) I covered it up and headed off to work for the day, but first thing Saturday Ethan and I headed out to crack on with it. First job was bolting down the main body – 4 main bolts down the sides and 2 at the rear and that was it – I used penny (or repair) washers as I wanted to spread the load as much as possible to guarantee a strong mount.

1 of the side bolts didn’t quite line up (by about 3mm) despite using a heavy duty strap to pull the body into line, so I redrilled the hole and the bolt dropped straight in. I doubt this was the kit, and far more likely the original Land Rover chassis, and was easily fixed.

A few months ago I had the tailgate painted as a tester for the paint job and it’s been sat in the garage fully made up with all the lights, license plate and spare wheel mount all this time. So next step was fitting it using the 6 bolts, another very easy job, but it did require a little adjustment up and down to make sure the latch worked easily before fully tightening the bolts.

Final bit at the back (for now) was then refitting the treadplate that sits just under the tailgate and then screwing on the rear step.

Down the sides I started screwing on the tread plate side steps and the kick plates but I’ve decided that these will rattle and collect muck so I’ve ordered some very thin sticky back foam and i’ll stick this to it before then screwing them onto the body.

To fit the gas rams to the bonnet I had to buy some new mounting balls as the rams didn’t come with them but I just ordered some online and they arrived next day. To depressurise the gas rams I actually drilled a tiny hole right at the bottom of the cylinder, but watch out doing this as you get quite a blow when the gas exits. Don’t drill the holes at the ram end as you’ll find that the ram won’t fully extend as it will foul on the tiny bit of swarf that gets left on the inside of the drill hole.

Check carefully which rams you need (I think the ones I got were for a 406 Boot but I’m not sure) as the first ones I bought were from the wrong model year and were too long. Should have checked first!

I checked they were the right length then actually released one end and tied them back with cable ties as I still have a lot of work to do in the engine bay and wanted to keep the ability to fully open the front forwards – even though the access is pretty amazing even with the rams in place.

NCF Sahara Kit Car Breaking News #3

Last time I said it would be a brief one but turned out to be quite a long one – this one will hopefully be shorter!

In summary: A couple of weeks ago the brand new custom radiator from Brunel arrived – despite FedEx’s best attempts to foil it by denting it so much it had to be returned and Jon repaired it (perfectly) then after that getting it as far as the FedEx warehouse 5 miles from my office, but then not bothering to actually send it out on a van!

First look at the radiator looks pretty good, seems to be a ‘’like for like’ fit for the original in terms of dimensions and pipe positions, so should be easy to get into place. I tried removing the original oil pipe adaptors from the original radiator but they are completely stuck in so I’ve got 4 new ones from a local garage and these seem to be the right fit. Jon @ Brunel had sent me 2 up in the post but Royal Mail have managed to lose them!

One of the reasons for the new radiator was to remove the need for the separate gearbox cooler (rusty hedgehog!) and therefore I had to get the pipes that run to and from the gearbox modified. By a judicious bit of chopping with a hacksaw and then some lengths of temporary copper pipes and jubilee clips I mocked up the length and angles needed to modify the original pipes to fit. I then took this to the local branch of PIRTEK in Hull and they did a great job of putting it together – £30 all in for the new rubber length in the middle and and all the fittings/labour etc. Its been made up to hydraulic pipe pressure levels so I don’t think it will split somehow!

I was going to mount it in place as this gets me 50% of the way to getting the engine running again, but I’ve decided to wait until I get the front end back from the Paint shop just in case I have any problems with it which might damage the new rad.  I’ll try and get some pictures of the new radiator and the modified oil cooler pipe up here soon.

Next bit of news is that I’ve now changed 3 of the 4 suspension springs for nice shiny yellow ones – both rear ones are done and also the front offside one. Sadly I ran out of time before I could change the final one but I’m hoping to get this done in the next few days. I’ve been removing the rust and painting+sealing the spring mounts so its taking a bit longer than a straight swap, but worth it as they will hopefully last a lot longer. Once I’ve got it done I’ll post some pics of these too and details of how I did it.

I’ve also finished painting all the bits of the chassis I can get to and also the floor pan of the car as well as patching a couple of minor holes that had appeared in a few places. I needed to get this all done before getting the body back on as once its on it’s a pain in the a**e to get to it all as there are no “doors” at floor level to open and reach in to paint. Most is accessible, but some of the areas up under the footwell are just not really accessible for painting/repair purposes.

Last weekend Liam and I went to the National Kit Car show at Stoneleigh and one of the suppliers there had a good range of race seats on show. I’ve been wavering back and forth on the seating issue, as originally I planned to replace them, but then decided to refurbish the originals. Having seen some Corbeau seats that I had originally considered I’ve now pretty much settled on replacing the original seats with nice shiny new ones –but I’m not saying which ones until later on so I don’t ruin the big reveal

Next big decision was the wheels – the plan was always to put on big chunky tyres, but the actual wheel choice is another thing I’ve wavered on. I had decided to get new alloy wheels, but then after looking at the existing alloys I decided to get these cleaned up and use these – they are very nice Land Rover Firestyle Alloys, so worth using. I even bought a 5’th (for the spare) from ebaY for a tenner. Then I got some quotes for refurbishment and these ranged from £50 a wheel to £80 a wheel and started to think this might be an expensive way to do it! In fact, brand new Firestyles are only £90 so not really worth it as mine might look great but they would still be 15 years old an could well have internal cracks etc.

So I’ve decided instead (I think) to go for black 8 spoke steel wheels, but I’m off to the LRO Spring Adventure show this weekend so I might entirely change my mind!

Final one for tonight – and definitely the most exciting – THE BODYWORK IS FINISHED AND COMING HOME TOMORROW!!!! As you can imagine I’m really excited about this and I suspect may have some trouble getting to sleep tonight (well, that and I’m watching the Election unfold – or maybe that will help…?). I visited the paint shop today to see it and it looks utterly amazing – I hoped it would look great, but I think it looks absolutely incredible and can’t wait to see it back on the chassis tomorrow afternoon. First thing tomorrow I have to race round to the Van hire company and pick up a flatbed van for the main bodywork, and a couple of guys from the office will bring the front section and doors back in the company van. Fingers crossed it should only take about 30 minutes to get it on the chassis and then we should be able to see a preview of what the final car will look like.

It’s ‘Dad’s night out’ in the village pub tomorrow night so it will be late on in the weekend before I get a chance to actually do anything to the car, but I can’t wait.

More to follow as I get a chance.

PS – Ok, it turned out to be quite a long one again, sorry about that!

Sahara Kit Car Breaking News #2

Hi All,

Just a really quick one tonight with a few really nice bits of news (well for me anyway, I’m sure most people think it’s pretty dull…)

The first was I got a phone call from the company that’s painting the Body this evening saying that the whole thing is now all fully primered and the black is all done on the rollcage. In the next few days they are starting the main body metallic paint so they’ve asked if I want to come down and see it before they start – so I’m off there tomorrow

The second is that my nice shiny new custom radiator is due to be delivered from Brunel Performance on Friday!

The third was due to a problem I had when I first fitted the body after it arrived.

To get it to fit we had had to remove the Aircon, and it later turned out that to get the struts in place to support the radiator I had to remove the now defunct AirCon pump – yes, I know this is the first I’ve written about that, but hopefully i’ll write that bit it in more detail soon!

The problem with this is that you then can’t use the existing Fan Belt (though apparently it’s actually called an ‘Auxiliary Belt’ on a Discovery!) and the tensioner is pointing the wrong way – this is shown when you look in the workshop manual that shows a picture for the belt routing when you have AirCon and when you don’t.

I had tried just turning the tensioner round so it’ pointed the right way, but there is a lug on the back that stops you then bolting it on in anything other than the correct orientation.

“AH!” I though – “You must need a different tensioner for non-AirCon” – the problem was could I find it? Could I buffalo…. The fact that it shows the different config in the manual would suggest that LR definitely had that as an option, but damned if I could find the alternate part anywhere….

Maltings Land Rover even sent me what they thought was the correct replacement part but it turned out to be exactly the same as the original but with a ribbed pulley wheel (LR Part ERR6439) instead of the original plain one (LR Part ERR3440) . It turns out this is actually for a Discovery 2 (mine is a Discovery 1) but other than the ribbing they are identical.

After several months of searching in vain I thought I finally had a licked when a fortnight ago a guy over on the Discovery Owners Club said he had one going spare and I could buy it off him. “Brilliant” I thought and sent him a PM. Only thing was, no reply at all.. More searching on the web even suggested I might have to drill a new hole into the engine block to rotate the old one – and that just sounds like a recipe for buggering it royally!

This evening I went out just to stare at it for a bit in case i saw a resolution – and suddenly I found the solution! It turns out that there are 2 sets of holes in the block – the first is to hold the tensioner the way for the AirCon configuration, and 2cms below that is another set that take the very same tensioner but the right way round for non-Aircon! Woohoo a solution!!!

Out with the replacement part from Maltings and a drop of Threadloc, bolt it in and tighten to 45NM and jobs-a-good-un.

Incidentally the reason for using the ribbed version becomes obvious when you look at how the belt has to run – the belt itself is ribbed to match on the “inside” and the outside is plain. In the AirCon routing, the back of the belt passes against the inside (as it towards the center of the engine block) edge of the pulley because it’s pulling ‘in’ to the engine. In non-AirCon, the belt passes round the outside of the pulley so the pulley is pushing out. This time the ribbed side is against the pulley block so you need the ribbed version instead.

Apparently you can just buy the replacement pulley wheel instead of having to replace the whole pulley assembly so that would be easier for anyone doing this in future. Hopefully this article will help anyone looking to solve the same problem!

Tomorrow I’m off the parts store to pick up the correct fan belt – ERR4461 is the part number – and worth noting that this is the same for the 3.9l V8 for the Discovery and also for the P38 Range Rover (or at least that’s what the web says!)

I’ve got to get all these bits sorted before I can put the new Rad in, hence the sudden need to get it all sorted.

Wish me luck for getting the belt on tomorrow night!