Bye bye blogging (& Twitter ...)

In an effort to spend more time focusing on what I enjoy, and less time writing about it, I'm no longer blogging or Tweeting.

I now have a static website up at http://duncan-bayne.github.com/, and if I end up making any significant changes to Rosemary, I'll make sure to add an entry to my Hacks and Projects page.

(Stuart & Wendy - in case you're reading this, rest assured that I'll still send you emails to let you know how Rosemary is faring).

Major work done

We've just had a lot of work done to Rosemary in order to register her in Victoria, and also to iron out a few little niggles. This included:

• a bunch of new bearings
• rework to the wiring loom and alternator connection to fix the lack of battery charging
• seatbelts (lap belts) fitted
• refit of the windscreen wipers and fitment of a water jet
• oil, filter change etc.

All the work was done by Anthony Johnson of British 4WD Imports. We were very impressed with his overall knowledge, the quality of work, and the fact that he's a genuinely nice guy to deal with. If you have an old Landy and live in Melbourne, I can strongly recommend that you fire him an email or give him a call.

He was even nice enough to patiently explain over the phone to me that the oil cap on a Series II is held on by a bolt ... :-/

Anyhow, my wife & I will hopefully be taking Rosemary on a few trips in the near future, & I've been using her for a bit of commuting (nothing beats a Land Rover for carrying cricket gear or luggage). I'm getting better at driving her (no synchro on first or second which is a challenge) and enjoying driving her more and more ...

Road trip to Tooradin

Over Christmas, my wife Andelys and I loaded up Rosemary and went on an overnight trip to Tooradin. Here are some photos and video from the trip.

You may notice that Rosemary has grown a spare wheel cover; we bought that as a Christmas present to stop water pooling in the spare wheel from rain or dew.


Tika and Ella packed


On the road to Tooradin


View from Rosemary


Sunset through a Land Rover


Tika taking a peek


Proud owner


Tika and Ella packed (video)

Puncture

While driving Rosemary around town, I ran over a chunk of wood that punctured the right rear tyre. It went very quickly with a bang and a hiss that was clearly audible over the gearbox and road noise.

A quick call to the RACV (we still haven't fitted her with a jack and appropriate spanner) and I had the spare fitted. The RACV mechanic was quite taken with Rosemary and spent some time crawling around under her.

He mentioned one thing I didn't know; the diff is strapped to prevent damage to the transmission should we get her airborne while offroading! She's a serious 4WD is Rosemary. To that end I've been chatting with an ex-colleague of mine, who's invited us on an off-road trip at some point.

I've explained that the track would need to be friendly enough for an inexperienced driver in a 39 year old car ...


Quite some splinter

Fitting the seats

When we collected Rosemary, she had modern(ish) bucket seats fitted, from some sort of Holden. We had already just swapped out the backs from two seats, but in order to fit all three original seats along the front I had to replace the rails with the originals.

Refitting the front seats took around four and half hours - most of this spent fiddling around trying to get at nuts hiding in almost inaccessible spots. At one point I dropped a 7/16th spanner which got stuck between the RHS fuel tank and its mounting bracket :-O


Old rails in place


RHS rail fitted

The RHS rail was the most awkward; I ended up having to (gently) manoeuvre a nut into place with a mole wrench, start the bolt off by hand, then swap the mole wrench for a spanner to tighten it.


Removing a painted-over washer


Front seat rails attached


Front seats fitted

I then got to work clearing out the back, and refitting the original bench seats. This was a much easier task, which only took around 45 minutes.


Rear bench seats fitted

FFT, not FFR

As it turns out, Rosemary is FFT (Fitted For Transceiver), not FFR (Fitted For Radio). These models were known first as FFW (Fitted For Wireless), then FFT, then FFR.

Nowra to Melbourne, 24th November 2009

This was Rosemary's inaugural road trip; we bought her in Nowra and drove her to Melbourne in a day. The only fault we discovered along the way was a failure to charge the battery.

She'd had a new alternator fitted recently, along with some changes to the wiring loom, and it looks like she's earthing the current from the alternator rather than charging with it.

We've found that we get several hours of motoring from an 850CCA battery. For the moment we're just taking shorter trips around town while we learn to drive her properly, so we run her off the battery and charge it overnight.