Break and Clutch cylinders

Okay so We said wed give the clutch and break cylinders a go! Weve decided to go the whole way with this project and actually strip the landy right down to the chassis and get it galvanised so ideally, we want to be taking everything off and restoring it before it comes back around to the time where we need to put everything back on! As you can see, our bulkhead needs a bit of work but well do that some other day down the line!

Heres the clutch cylinder before we got the spring and seals actually out of it!The solution for getting them out was WD-40 , a hammer and a vice, and just go mad!You would hit it downwards against the vice until the piston gets so far, then youd turn it around, fill it with oil and then hit it back down again, by repeating this over and over again, the piston eventually works itself out and you have yourself a nice clean chamber!

the actuall pedal boxes dont need much work, just a bit of oil and a wire brush!

After we took everything out, cleaned and oiled everything, this was the end result after reassembling!

theres just a few pictures of the wire bush effect!

Off goes the rest of the body

Since we have a perfect engine, our main objective now is to strip down the rest of the body and refurbish and repair the chassis and sand-blast and zinc it so that it'll last atleast my life time anyway!

Well the diesel tank may look nice and square there, but when we took it out, which didnt take much effort, there was a massive dent on the bottom side of it.I ve been told that were just going to weld some flat bar to the dent, and pull it out, doesn't sound too complicated does it?Its funny that when we emptied the tank there was over €70 worth of diesel in it!!

Apart from that, the chassis is actually in great nick! The front half is near enough to perfect because of all the diesel that used to fall on it, and the back half is pretty much the same. The only pace that needs some attention is the rear crossmember (the back of the chassis). I think were just going to fabricate a new one, and fill in any weak spots, sand blast the whole chassis, and then paint it with zinc.

Although this may sound perfect, its still not as good as the whole chassis being galvanised,so, in theory, our chassis could still rot from the inside out, so what were going to do is, were going to screw in two holes through the back bucket and into the chassis, and were going to have two screw caps to close them and seal them. What were going to do with these is, every so often we'll pour in old engine oil into them which will keep the inside of the chassis in perfect nick. Every time I change the oil, ill pour the old oil in, that should keep everything under control!

Theres the whole exhaust system,which Im going to replace. My plan is, to buy a mild steel exhaust system for my series 3 and galvanise it, which will save me the hassle of ever having to replace the bugger again!

Heres all the bits and pieces I took off the rear bucket before we took it off the chassis!

and of course, Id just like to point out that there are some luxuries in life, you cant do without, like this good ol burner! In the freezing cold mornings, this has kept us going!!!

The roof goes off

Well this job wasn't too difficult . . There were six main fixings to un-bolt , three on each side of the roof. They weren't too hard to remove with the odd bit of WD40 close at hand. The hardest part of the whole removal was getting all the bolts from above the windscreen off. This was by far,the hardest task so far, but was very rewarding when I finished as the roof came right off!! I had the boss close by and between the two of us, we managed to get the whole thing off and in to the back of the trailer along with all the other parts i've removed so far. . .

When we had started this project, we were told two things . .1) the axles were siezed and we'd probably need something to lift it on the trailer and 2) the engine was coming to the end of its time and oil was coming up from the cap

Ofcourse when we dragged the landy out of the field by its tow-bar, the axle problem was soon forgotten. . but the engine was still on our minds, even up to this moment. It'd either be the life or death of the project. Since we'd got the jeep down to this state, we decided to get an engineer over to have a look, Mc Nallys Paddy! ive been told that he has everything you could possibly need for any kind of job, in the back of his jeep! Anyhow before we got Paddy over, we decided to start her up and get the engine warm so itd start on the button for when he was there. As the boss started the engine, the usual horrible ship-wrecked sound came out of her but we noticed that diesel was pumping out all over the engine from a loose pipe from the diesel pump. We turned the engine off, tightened the pipe, restarted her, and boom!!! It sounded like a brand new engine!! What a success!!!! No oil was coming from the engine, it was the diesel the whole time,and when Paddy came over and seconded us by saying the engine was perfect, that just made our week!!

To finish off the great work that was done, we had to put all the extra parts we'd taken off away, which, thanks to a very good friend of ours, was made possible!