Freelander 1 welding question - Seat belt anchorages

Hi all, Just joined the forum. I'm looking at a few Freelander 1's at the moment ... don't mind a cheap project, in fact that's exactly what i'm looking for but I have a question about welding and couldn't find anything on the forums about this specific issue, not sure if its common or not and hoping someone here has knowledge / experience in dealing with it.

So, found a car local to me that I really like. It needs a few things doing, none of which concern me except the old MOT history which suggests structural weakness in close proximity to seat belt mounting points. Judging by the MOT dates the guy just took it to a different MOT station the very next day and suddenly all the issues were fixed. Seemed a bit dodgy to me but anyway, I can weld so my question is ...

Has anyone had to weld a Freelander 1 to fix this issue? and if so do you by any chance have pictures and / or advice on the job.

Thanks very much for any replies, looking forward to joining the Land Rover community!

J

It could be that first MOT garage was overzealous about corrosion.
My last MOT test would have mine in a scrap yard this year. Mine has some light surface corrosion, which I've mostly addressed in preparation for the next MOT.

However if you are at all concerned about this vehicle's structural condition, it's generally best to look for another one. I'm guessing the seat belt mountings mentioned in the MOT are for the rear belts, as the front belt mountings are either hidden inside the B pillar, or are part of the seat frame.

The FL1 does suffer from corrosion, but they're generally better than other LRs, which rot away for a past time.

Post lots of pictures of anything rusty on here, for us to take a look at.

This guy did a lot of welding on his Freelander, in his case it was sills but you might have similar issues if this one is rusty.

I have just started working on welding up the sills on our new Freelander 1. It's triple layer which is a bit of a pain, because if the layer in the middle rusts out you have to cut off the outer sill, even if it's solid, to get to the middle layer.
I haven't been able to find new outer sill panels (except for Rimmerbros but they want £1400 per side) but there are generic channel sections on ebay so for now I bought one of those. The tricky thing is that the out sill kicks in where the plastic finisher clips over the rear end of the sill so I will have to try and make that shape myself.

pscan.eu said:

I have just started working on welding up the sills on our new Freelander 1. It's triple layer which is a bit of a pain, because if the layer in the middle rusts out you have to cut off the outer sill, even if it's solid, to get to the middle layer.
I haven't been able to find new outer sill panels (except for Rimmerbros but they want £1400 per side) but there are generic channel sections on ebay so for now I bought one of those. The tricky thing is that the out sill kicks in where the plastic finisher clips over the rear end of the sill so I will have to try and make that shape myself.

Click to expand...

I've just had to do a similar repair on my daughter's Toyota Aygo. The outer sill had some bubbles under the paint, which I knew would be holes after grinding back. However the inner structure was missing altogether, so I had to repair that before repairing the outer sill.
The sill end capping was also in a bad way, so that was replaced as well. I did struggle to weld up the outer sill, as the metal is like paper, I measured it at 0.6mm, so getting the wire feed and amperage right too some time.

Hopefully that's enough to get it through the MOT for another year.