A Blog About Land Rovers in Oklahoma
In this episode, I manage to get some good welds. Together with some bolts, I think the floor bed is installed!!!!!
Now I need to clean up the welds and cover the steel in some primer and paint. You know, to prevent rust, wink, wink.
I know this will rust again, I’m just hoping by the time it does, I’m on to another vehicle.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.
Yeah, these welds go to SEVEN. As Nigel Tufnel of the legendary band, Spinal Tap, says, “…but these go to eleven.” I turned up the voltage on my welder to get better welds.
I started with setting 4 wire speed and C voltage on my Lincoln Pro Mig 180 welder. Those welds did not hold. Drilling them out ate two drill bits and caused me to sharpen one of them twice during this ordeal.
So I turned it up to 7 D. Why the wire speed needed to be so much faster at this level of voltage is till a mystery to me, but hey, whatever works.
Hopefully these work. I am going to reinforce the welding with some bolts just to make sure any “flexing” of the body doesn’t sound like I just cracked the Big White Bus in half, when those weld break free. It will give me some piece of mind too that the floor bed will not go anywhere with all my gear strapped to it.
I also sorted out that I had my braces on wrong. This was why the bed was bulging in the middle. I don’t know how many times I went through how those needed to be installed and I still got them wrong. They are on correctly now and the bed panel fits SO much better.
That’s about all. I really appreciate two of my viewers who pointed out that the welds were not penetrating.
Wallace, who just recently acquired a Range Rover Classic and will be starting on his restoration at some point in 2025. And…
Trevor from Tumbleweed Garage [YouTube channel] who is restoring a Willys Pickup. He is doing a great job and I love watching how his mind works. He does a lot without any fancy tools, proving once again you don’t need to spend a king’s ransom to play with cars in your garage.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.
Well that was a waste of a weekend. In a misguided attempt to correct bad welding, I propose it is my ground. Turns out that was wrong too.
So we filmed a lot of wasteful effort to get the floor bed installed.
I received a lot of help from people emailing me and messaging me. The consensus, the welder is not hot enough. I need to turn up the voltage.
This is an exercise in frustration. My next video will be with hotter settings on the welder and hopefully some welds that stick.
I’m pretty sure the bracing is in the wrong place on the frame supports too. There is a bow in the bed that can only be explained by these braces being in the wrong place.
More on that in the next video too.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.
Happy New Year!
In this episode I diagnose a non-starting Range Rover. Turns out it was actually pretty simple. I do some mostly-questionable things in this video. When working with gasoline (petrol for those of you in the “other English” speaking countries) you need to be VERY careful. More careful than I am in this video.
First, I try to catch fuel from the return line, which would not have come out of that line, it would come out of the rail on top the engine. In itself not terribly dangerous on a cold engine. The second is opening the fuel lines from the fuel pump. Again not terribly dangerous in itself, but not smart either. A little static electricity and this may have been my last video. So don’t be stupid.
SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read the next paragraph if you haven’t watched the video and still want to be surprised by the cause of my non-starting Range Rover Classic.
Ever run out of gas? Well, I have now for my second time in 44 years of driving. I ran out once when I was 18 years old. I was 2 miles from the gas station and just forgot to fill up the FIRST time I passed the station. My dad was cool, and came and got me, chastised me the 2 miles to the gas station and was kind enough to drive me back to my 1973 Ford Maverick.
The second time I ran out of gas…was apparently last week after I parked the Big White Bus. I guess I had just enough gas to get her back into the garage.
Yeah, my non-starting was due to an empty fuel tank. I put 8 gallons in and she started right up. LOL.
I took the rest of the day and finished welding the Z bar on to the rear floor pan. Then I painted it. I spend a little extra time spraying paint into the gap between the Z bar and the floor pan. The idea here was the liquid paint would go between the metals and hopefully coat between the two pieces. I will also file the space with rattle-can rhino-liner, chip sealer, or whatever you want to call it. Then I will fill the gap with seam sealer.
I got to some length about perhaps melting some wax and making it run in there. Sounds like a great idea, but probably not a great idea. I’ll stick to seam sealer.
That’s about it, Like and subscribe.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.
In this episode. Grady and I get the Z bar welded to the floor pan panel. After the debacle of last week was finally solved, we had some new tools and great grounds to work with. These allowed for our plug welds and our panel butt-welds to hold.
I also noticed I had the heat up too high on the welder. Once I lowered that, the welder didn’t blow through the panel. There were a LOT of welds. We went through a half tank of shielding gas. And in the end we ran out of gas. So next weekend I’m going to need to get down to the welding supply house and get a fresh tank of gas.
If you remember the first video we determined we needed to cut about an 1/8th of an inch off one side. It turned out to be closer to 1/4th of an inch when I finished. We used the pinch vise clamps, some hammering, and a lot of bending to get the panel flat enough to make good welds.
Grady got to weld quite a few welds. I think I need a second welding mask so I can watch his technique and help him to get better. He did a pretty good job after he got the hang of it. Its fun for me to see him engaged and wanting to learn.
We have 2/3rds of the sides on now. Our first task will be to get the last one welded on and to fit it ONE MORE TIME. We fitted the panel and I’m 92.6% sure the panel will go in cleanly and fit properly.
That’s all for this week.
We wish you all a very Merry Christmas.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering. Like and subscribe.
This week is part two of Grady and I trying to get the damn Z bar attached to the bed. We had a helluva time getting our welds to stick. In the end it came down to me removing a lot of the primer and paint I spent so much time getting into place.
The welds were not taking because the ground was poor. It required me to grind off a lot of paint and to get new vice clamps to hold the steel together.
Taking that paint off was no challenge for the power tools. It was painful to me because my ultimate goal in all this was to put this floor bed back together BETTER than it was before. The better is that I don’t have to worry about it rusting out.
Once I get it back together, I am going to spend significant time getting it recoated with paint and rust preventative coverings. This may be challenging with winter now upon us. It was 70F today but it is in the thirties in the mornings. I’m hoping for a warm spell around the new year so I can get the paint applied.
That’s about it for this episode. Like and Subscribe.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.