Discovery 1: the project that never ends

Hello all, my first post on here. Here's my 300tdi landy.



I've been driving it for over a year no bother but then my belt snapped which in turn overheated it and blew my head gasket (oops). Whilst it was in the garage I had a poke about with a screwdriver (bad idea), here is what I found.

Sills


Taking off the rear quarter panel revealed this


Having seen the state of my inner wings I decided a complete new set was in order. Here's one of my old wings.

Happy days, my driver's side footwell is rotten and holey as well


Okay so at this point I got a bit flustured seeing the amount of work that needed doing, in the mean time my mate had decided he wanted to re-spray it as well as the paintwork was a bit tatty so I said yeah ok we may as well try and restore the whole bloody lot!!

Realising my stick welder wouldn't cut it neither would my pathetic little non gas MIG welder, I splashed out and bought a nice Oxford MIG maker 200. So far this welder seems brilliant to use especially on thin landy steel.


Having cut away all the old wheel arches and wings the bottom of the headlight box was rotten but it looked salvageable so a new piece of steel welded in the bottom meant the headlight box passenger side was saved.


Yrm panels looked like they did a nice set of inner wings so I said goodbye to my bank balance and got to work.



Bearing in mind all this work was done after work maybe 2 hours spend on it most days and a couple of Sundays as well it had taken a good month to just get it to this point. Finally, I had one side of the wing complete.

All this progress isn't up to date yet, I'm currently sorting the rear wheel arches, so there's a few more pics to follow .

Firstly, Welcome Aboard

Secondly, , D1's are all like that unfortunately - until they've been fixed

Well done for taking it on and saving another one - we run two D1's, and they are brilliant, simple vehicles which will last for ever if looked after.

If you don't know, do a search on here about proper rust treatment / prevention

Watching all these welding threads with great interest at the moment, all the pics you can post will be of interest. Mine appears to be better than most but sadly it’s going to be inevitable for them all as time goes on.

Now on to the driver's side which was considerably worse, a rotten footwell which I put down to wet feet coming in and out all the time, the previous owner had no proper floor mats just carpet. I cut out a few rectangles of rust and then cut out new steel to fit flush and weld in place. I ran seam welds a couple of inches long and then stopped to avoid burn through. Even went to the fuss of grinding down the beginning of each seam weld to weld back over the top for better penetration. This way I had full penetration all the way round and looking at the repair from the inside proved this.



I put a new piece of steel at the top and bottom of the sides of the footwell, at the bottom you can see a bit of rusty metal. This was obviously not ideal but it was only slightly thinner metal than the rest and it was still thick enough to weld to. It would have been an arse ache to cut more of it out because of the shape of it and the weird way land rover fastened it at the bottom with plug welds and mysterious "I don't know how this metal is attached to this bit of metal" and seam filler and ****. So it's been treated with rust killer, and like the rest of it including inner wings then had primer, stone chip and then hammerite on top. I think it'll be fine.


And lastly, I welded on a new platform horizontally for the new inner wing to sit on, and seam welded top and bottom for good measure.

Done. Nice and strong. Try and rot that, land rover.

Disco1BFG said:

Firstly, Welcome Aboard

Secondly, , D1's are all like that unfortunately - until they've been fixed

Well done for taking it on and saving another one - we run two D1's, and they are brilliant, simple vehicles which will last for ever if looked after.

If you don't know, do a search on here about proper rust treatment / prevention

Click to expand...

Cheers for the welcome
These discos are the best I agree, love driving it more than any other car

Well done for getting on and doing the welding. Liking the project!

Keep us updated

Well done, nice to see someone not scared of getting the welder out.

Poor old thing, bet she's got some more surprises in store for you

You going to buy the sill panels and rebuild them or cut the lot out and go for box section HD sills?

nicely done

Well done, keep up the good work. Not looking forward to getting to that stage on mine as I've never held a welding torch in my life.

Well done, keep up the good work. Not looking forward to getting to that stage on mine, I've never held a welding torch in my life.

Cheers for the comments, here's what I've been up to a bit more recently...

Once the drivers side foot well repair was done, I got round to doing the inner wing. The headlight box this side was rusted beyond repair, so I bought a new headlight box/body mount from ebay, and as you can see from the below picture drilled out the spot welds on top of the slam panel to get the old box out.


Here is the drivers side completed, I puddle welded the new headlight box and body mount to the old slam panel, and went at them carefully with a flap disc to smooth them down to make a flush seamless finish. The g clamp is acting as the body mount bolt for now, I somehow managed to strip the thread on the old bolt.



So now that the whole front section was rebuilt, I test fitted the outer wings and bonnet. To my surprise, the panel gaps were pretty spot on, well no worse than how land rover fitted them from the factory!!
I re-attached all the gubbins that sits on the wheel arches, abs and brake box, air box, water bottle holder ect. I avoided drilling any holes for them to screw on because holes would be a starting place for rust. Instead, I puddle welded everything onto the top of the wheel arches.
All the bare metal was primered, all the little gaps had seam filler run along them, and then a few coats of stonechip paint and then black hammerite on top.

So that's the front end finished, we got the engine all back together, all the wiring back in place and started her up.

Next, for the rear wheel arches!!

dieseldog69 said:

Well done, nice to see someone not scared of getting the welder out.

Poor old thing, bet she's got some more surprises in store for you

You going to buy the sill panels and rebuild them or cut the lot out and go for box section HD sills?

Click to expand...

The plan is to replace the whole lot including floor, and use box section for the sills and re-fabricate a floor to fit. I spent most of today trying to get the old sill off, what a bloody job and a half!

Now for the rear wheel arch, which looked like this. Pretty much any of the rusty metal you can see here was thin enough to rip if you gave it a little tap with a screwdriver. The main pillar was pretty bad too.
The bit that you see when you open the rear door (the visible bit of outer wheel arch) had a hole in it and was generally a bit worse for wear, so I've got a new pair to put on. To take the old ones off there's just a series of spot welds to drill out along where the rubber door seal goes, and two attaching it to the sill. I used an 8mm spot weld drill bit and only drilled through the top bit of metal.

So I cut a few rectangles of nice crusty metal out. The dremel and little cutting disc was a life saver here, I would never have got into the tight corners with my 4 inch grinder. I also cut a long strip out the length of the arch where it meets the wall, but don't seem to have a photo of it.

Most of the pillar was ok, apart from one side of it, so again the dremel came in handy cutting a piece of it out.


I cut out and bent a new piece of steel to fit in the vice, after a bit of trial and error bashing with a hammer in the right places, everything matched pretty well. Welded it in and a grind back for a flush finish.

A new piece the length of the wheel arch, seam welded it all the way up the sides, I had a bit of a gap so it took a couple of passes, three passes in places to build it up and fully weld everything. I gave it a little seam weld onto the pillar.


Then welded new steel into the side wall and top of the wheel arch, fully seam welded it to the pillar for strength. The long strip welded all the way and welds flattened down a bit so that the interior and carpet fits flat once its all put back together.

That's the repair pretty much done I think, I put fertan up all inside the pillar and when I get round to it I need to clean it all and then paint. I have left the outer bit of wheel arch off for now because I recon it will be easier to replace the sills without it being in the way.

I had to do essentially the same job to the OS of SWMBO's 3 door - what a ballache that was - and as you you say, without a "dremel" ( other multi tools are available ) it would have been almost impossible.

In terms of the box section pillars - I've been using Bilt Hamber Dynax S-50 cavity wax - the aerosols come with a decent wand to get into the places other probes can't reach

I'm trying to wait for much better weather before I pull the rear quarter off my 3 door, that's some impressive work

Nice an easy in a dry work space

dieseldog69 said:

I'm trying to wait for much better weather before I pull the rear quarter off my 3 door, that's some impressive work

Nice an easy in a dry work space

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Cheers I hope you're a patient man because waiting for dry weather in this country might take a while

Disco1BFG said:

I had to do essentially the same job to the OS of SWMBO's 3 door - what a ballache that was - and as you you say, without a "dremel" ( other multi tools are available ) it would have been almost impossible.

In terms of the box section pillars - I've been using Bilt Hamber Dynax S-50 cavity wax - the aerosols come with a decent wand to get into the places other probes can't reach

Click to expand...

Ah right would you use that wax straight onto bare metal or use primer or something else first?

joeinafield said:

Ah right would you use that wax straight onto bare metal or use primer or something else first?

Click to expand...

I'm using onto bare metal - degreased when I can get access to do so... It seems to be working too - both ours have just passed the MOT with no advisories

I've found bilt hamber's technical folk very good - phone number on the website - they are, IME, actually interested in what you're doing - rather than the, er, usual, "sales" bollox <- I'm too old and cantankerous for such carp

This still going Joe? It's a good thread and gave me a lift lol