Which do you think was faster?

While up at my mate's farm where my Pulsar is. We decided to go for a little drive. He in his AWD Subaru and me in my FWD beat up Pulsar.

And who won? Me of course. Despite the nissan having this happen to it

Though it may have been like that before we started. We can't remember now. Thinking about it though, that may have had something to do with me not being able to turn particularly well. Especially the bottom corner, a big 180 bend. I could steer nicely through the first half, but then it would just go straight for the next couple of meters no matter what I did.

And we did our part for the environment. There are now a few less blackberry bushes standing in that paddock. They may still be there, but they are a lot flatter now.

With a big storm coming over the hill we decided to get a bit artsy with the car.

Credit has to go to my Mate for this one. I'm pretty happy with how it ended up so I might claim it. After all it was taken on my phone.

If we remember, next time we will get the Go-Pro out. It was sitting in the car we drove up there, but we completely forgot to get it out once we started the cars.

Cheers,
Rex

A ute will keep you in demand

Part of owning a ute is being the person who can move the big or heavy or dirty things around without an issue. So when my parents needed some help to get some concrete slabs home I had myself an excuse for a nice drive.

Here is the first one in place and ready to go. Having a quick breather before moving the second one. Each of these weighs about 80kg so I'm sure you're wondering how we moved them? Well thankfully we didn't have to just muscle them. In a pinch 2 of me could move one, however it would be quite hard work and slow going; with plenty of potential for hurting yourself.

This picture might help. You can just see what we used to make it so easy to move these.

Thankfully Mum & Dad have an engine hoist which easily lifts loads like these. We had a couple of proper lifting slings so with those under the slab and someone to steady the load it was very easy to roll the hoist over to where they needed to go. Once they were nearly there we could just slide the slabs sideways by their width and the lifting was done.

And why did we need to put in some big heavy slabs? In this box are a heap of big batteries for running the house. Batteries like these need a very solid base that ideally is slightly elevated so anything on the ground needs to climb a bit before getting to them. Hopefully these slabs will hold them for years to come.

So thank you Mum & Dad for giving me a reason for a nice drive out there and a chance to ogle at their new power system going together.

Cheers,
Rex

Back door now installed

I have had a door for my Land Rover since I bought it, however it was not installed, nor did it have enough bolts to just put it on. So on the weekend I fixed that.

In this photo you can just see a hand holding the door on. Before you could use the top hinge to locate it and hold it in place. This didn't really do much other then prove the door fitted. But it was a start.

The nuts I found were too small for the holes that have been drilled in the frame of the door. So I had to make up a backing plate to stop them from pulling through. This came from a piece of scrap angle I had sitting around. A few minutes with the grinder and the drill and it was ready to go.

It is still a mess inside. But that isn't as obvious now with the door shut. I'm not sure if it's supposed to, but the geometry of the hinges means that it half wants to open itself. Not a bad thing, but interesting.

Unfortunately for now this is my latch. I don't quite have a complete lock mechanism for the door so while I sort out how to lock it properly this will do.

This was a nice, fairly quick project that has definately helped make the car more weatherproof. Hopefully soon I will have the brakes sorted and then I can move onto the next part. Possibly the lights which are missing.

Cheers,
Rex

What a bunch of stick in the mud's

Yep, It's Stuck.

In the process of helping Mum & Dad move out to a new property we decided to take my ute and go for a tour, right up the back. Apparently to ground up the is pretty boggy and we managed to get my ute stuck in there. The ground was solid enough until after you drove over it. Once you did that and disturbed the crust then all the loose soft stuff below would just let you sink.

Then when we came back the next day with another ute it got stuck as well.

That lighter coloured mud was oozing out from under the wheel while we were standing there talking about what to do next.

This may have had something to do with why we got stuck.

We ended up getting a set of recovery tracks. (Not this brand but similar) and all of a sudden we were out. These things worked so much better than we thought. Even my 2wd ute with an open diff was fine. Until I reversed a little close to a tree for comfort and had to stop again.

The first one goes free.

We put some old carpet in front of the cars so that they had something to help stop them sinking through again. It seemed to help, particularly in the first bit getting up speed again.

We were stuck pretty well. There were a few diff shaped divots in the ground as well.

Cheers,
Rex

Long weekend, Means more time on project cars

So with Monday being a public holiday for me I decided to get some more work done on the land rover. I didn't get a whole lot done but I made some good progress on fixing what was stopping the car from moving properly. First I removed the screws that hold on one of the brake drums.

Some jobs just can't be done without the proper tools. In this case an impact screw driver. Greatfully borrowed from dad. Turns out this was the easiest drum to do. Later in the evening I tried to get the fronts loose. No luck at all. Until I brought out the blue wrench. With a little bit of heat I managed to get the screws free. I didn't get the front drums off as they were still pretty stiff and I didn't want to bang too much as it was starting to get late.

What I did manage to do however was completely loose my brake pedal. No, It was still on the floor. It just went all the way there without any resistance. The brakes were always a little spongy since I bought it so they were on the to do list. But this made it a bit more urgent.

Could this be the cause? The inner part of this reservoir seems to be for the clutch as it was still working and had a bit of fluid still there. However the outside did not have any left at all.

The fix? No. But the first step. After filling the reservoir up I could hear the master squeezing something around. For a little I was worried that the master may be dead and started thinking about ways to test that. Then I realized. I was overthinking this.
If the reservoir was empty then the master would have been sucking air. If it was sucking air then it would have been pushing air out. Then there would be air in the brake lines. Therefore the brakes probably need to be bled.

This is what ended up coming out before the bubbles stopped. This was on one wheel. As soon as I nipped the bleeder back up the brake pedal was firmer than it ever has been. I only ended up bleeding the one wheel as that has restored the brakes to where I am happy with them for now. Currently all 4 wheels are off and it is on stands so I am not going to be trying to stop it any time soon. Also I may be pulling some stuff apart on the brakes depending on what is needed which means that I will need to bleed it again. No point doing something twice.

Now I need to go up the front and see if I can find the problem and fix it so the car will roll freely in high range.

Cheers,
Rex

No More Leaks

On Saturday I finished putting the new gasket that was needed onto the waterpump on my Land Rover. I talked about the beginning of the process here.

The problem I had was that I needed some kind of gasket as a spacer to make sure that the impeller doesn't contact the block as the back of the housing. I decided to have a go at making a gasket out of cork from scratch for the spacer.

Armed with a memory of instructions I found on the internet on how to do this I got started. Getting the outside shaped was amazingly easy. With my ball peen hammer I tapped around the edge of the housing which cut the cork on the corner of the housing.

The rest was a bit more difficult. The bigger open spaces allowed me to use the same hammer technique, however when it got in close to the impeller the hammer couldn't reach anymore so I had to resort to using scissors and checking against the housing regularly.

To get the bolt holes we got 2 hammers, set the ball peen of one over the hole and tapped. This cut the cork or at least made a mark, enough so that I could cut the rest of the hole out with scissors.

You can just see the pump in place. I probably should have painted the fan shroud while I had it out, but I didn't really have the abrasives to clean it up enough for good painting.

In the middle you can see a temperature gauge reading about 80 Degrees Celsius. This was after driving around a bit and seeing how the brakes go and so on. Because the fan is always going it probably takes a little longer to warm up than I am used to with a more modern car, but it still gets there no worries so no concerns there.

Now sitting in the back of the yard so I could get the fireball dinghy out. It will move under it's own power, but only in low range. in high range there seems to be something holding it back. I know the brakes need some work so that is my current theory, one of the wheels might not be letting go properly. After that issue is fixed it should be driving well, just needs a full fluid change then I can get on to making sure it will pass rego.

Cheers,

Rex

Charging Batteries

While I've got the front of the engine bay apart for replacing the water pump here I have the battery sitting on my back veranda not doing much. So I figured I would give it a charge. However I don't have a proper battery charger. I do have a more sophisticated tool that will charge a battery though.

Enter the laboratory power supply. This one is a fairly cheap one that I picked up off ebay a couple of years ago. It's noting to write home about but it is more than enough for this job. The reason it will work for this is that I can set it to output a maximum of 13.8V which is the standard charging voltage for lead acid batteries. It also has a constant current mode which would be useful for smaller batteries which should be charged slower, but a big one like this can probably handle as much as this relatively small supply will provide.

I just used a set of jumper leads to connect the battery as they are all that I have that will fit the posts built into the battery.

Here we are after about 1/2 to 3/4 of an hour. The battery is still accepting .52A of current into it at the full charging voltage of 13.8V which means that it is essentially full. Certainly close enough for me. Tomorrow or the day after I am going to pull the 2nd battery out of the Land Rover and see if it will charge up. The previous owner said that it didn't charge for him but I want to see exactly what happens as sometimes a "dead" lead acid battery can be brought back to life.

I will leave this battery on charge until I go to bed tonight to trickle it up as much as it will, then I will take it off the charge to reduce the risk of something going wrong, boiling, hydrogen production, etc.

Cheers,
Rex

Fixing the Land Rover

I've made a start on what needs to be done on my new Land Rover. The biggest thing that had to be done first was replace the water pump. The one that was on it had failed so badly that the weep hole in the housing has a stream coming out of it, even when the engine isn't running. I want to get this fixed so I can keep the engine full of coolant and be able to just start it when I need to move it, rather than having to top it off and then try and do everything as quickly as possible.

This is the new pump. I ordered it from E-Bay. It is still raw metal though so I grabbed a can of Kill-Rust paint that I had sitting around and made it not raw metal.

Looks pretty good. I think I will start doing this to all of the parts I take off, to help protect them and also to make the engine bay look a bit cleaner.

We thought it would be easiest to remove the radiator entirely. I forgot to take a picture, but here it is without a rad. There was about 12 bolts with nuts holding it on so we had to take off the grill and then with 2 of us remove all of them, making sure that it didn't fall down as we undid the last few bolts.

Here is the fan and pulley removed. There is a light coat of rust on the inside of the pulley caused by the leak from the pump. Interesting to note the blade and hole spacing is not even. 2 sides are longer and 2 are shorter. Weird.

Really good access now the radiator is out of the way. The water pump is front and center, ready to be removed.

And now it's gone. It is a little crusty inside the housing, however noting is loose so I'm not going to worry about cleaning it other than the gasket surfaces.

The new pump didn't come with a gasket so I was going to have to work something else out. To get this finished that night we were going to try this to seal it up, which should have worked. However the impeller is so deep that without the thickness of the gasket then it collides with the block and can't spin. So I am going to have a crack at making a gasket for this as a spacer as much as anything and then I should be able to start driving this around the yard.

Cheers,
Rex

Look What I bought

So just before I went away last week sailing I bought myself another project. I have bought myself an old Series 2A Land Rover. It has one of the original 2.25 Litre 4 Cylinder Petrol engines. It does run, however a lot of water leaks from the weep hole on the water pump. More like a stream than a leak. So that's the first thing I'm fixing.

Here are some photos I've taken when I brought it home, then some from a couple of days ago when I was playing with the rear door.

I currently have frames with glass for both windows, however they have rusted pretty badly so they will probably need to be replaced before I put this on the road.

I am keeping a list of what I need to do, Need to buy and what I have bought on this page. Which you can also access from the sidebar on the left hand side of the page.

I'll have some pics of the waterpump install to go up in the next couple of days.

Cheers,
Rex

Sometimes it doesn't work out

Over the weekend I tried to save some money. The car we recently bought for my lovely girlfriend needed new tires. We knew that when we bought it though so no shocks there. What I did realize though is that I have a car with tires that still have a little tread on them on a car in a paddock that doesn't need tires that are legal on the road so I thought I'd try and put those wheels on the Mazda.

This is one of the stock wheels on the Mazda, They are a 165/70R13. So they are 165mm wide at the tread and have sidewalls that are 70% of that width. The tires on the Pulsar are a 195/50R15 so 195mm wide with a sidewall 50% of that width. That means that they are lower profile and are less likely to roll over themselves during a corner; but we aren't going to be doing that sort of cornering in this car.

Being that they are a bit wider I wasn't sure if they would fit. But in the name of not wasting a set of tires with a decent bit of tread left on them I decided to give it a go anyway.

Here they are in situ. Let's do this the easy way.

A rattle gun. With proper impact bits even. I learned my lesson after wrecking a 1/2" drive to 1/4" drive adapter with this thing. Get the proper impact bits. And so far I haven't wanted to use this driver on a bolt other than the sizes in this set so for most cases a basic set like this is plenty ample.

I did however make the mistake of undoing all of the wheels in one go. Then trying to take them off one at a time. If I was doing this on a hoist that wouldn't be a problem. But if the car is sitting on it's wheels then as you jack it it will move a surprising amount and you want all of the other wheels to be secure as it's shifting to stop it falling over.

This was the only jack I had with me. It's just the one that came with my Rodeo ute and was doing fine. Until it wasn't. All of a sudden it just wouldn't move either way. I'm not sure what happened but it worked fine the next day so it might've just gotten cold, or just needed a bit of rattling around in the toolbox on the back of the ute.

Luckily there have been a couple of paddock bashers through this paddock and we have usually taken the jacks out. Either because we needed to use them, or we wanted one less loose thing in the car with us. I managed to find this one down near where some of these cars have been kept in the past. It even had a driver on it so I could put a socket on there and jack up the car with the rattle gun. Very easy way of doing it.

So this is why they say to do this on level ground? That black dot is the last tire. It didn't fall over when I dropped it after taking it off. Then I couldn't kick it over to stop it so I just let it go. It finished not far from this picture so I just picked it up on my way out.

Here we are. That's a pretty tight fit. Overall these wheels have a slightly larger diameter. But within what is allowed by law so it's only a case of will they hit anything?

Moment of truth here...

And a no go. Unfortunately we don't just drive in a straight line so these wheels didn't fit.

We had a new set put on today for about $400. Not going to take food off the table, but it would've been nice to be able to put that off for a few weeks even.

But that's something to remember. As much as I do eventually get just about everything working how I want it. Sometimes it just isn't going to happen and the time and effort you have invested could probably have been better served elsewhere. But this was only a bit of fun and the results either way was very much more about if I could do it, rather than it being critical.

Cheers,
Rex