Yeah, I know! YOU SHOULD NEVER SAY THOSE WORDS ABOUT A LAND ROVER!
So let me clarify. My to-do list is dwindling.
On Sunday I was able to pull the headliner. This job is no challenge. It is a 1 on the Difficulty Scale I will buy a couple of yards of fabric and some spray glue at Gibson’s and get it all put back together maybe this weekend.
I also found out why the sunroof would not retract. Some of the structure was bumping the glass panel as it retracted. I pulled and tugged on the metal that was causing the friction. I’m not sure how RovErica managed to bend this, probably rough housing or climbing from the front seat to the back seat. I also had a scenario in my head with her sitting on the roof with her feet dangling through the sunroof. Either way it is more or less fixed with a little coaxing of the metal back where it belongs.
The Park Neutral Switch problem was a bit more complicated. After researching and reading about the switch I crawled under the middle of the Range Rover. I found out the switch is virtually unreachable from the bottom and impossible to reach from the top. So I made what I will call a simplification of systems repair.
Yes, I simplified the system by cutting the wires and disabling the switch. It has always been one of my complaints that the Range Rover of the 1990s was WAY TOO COMPLICATED with electrical this-and-that’s. This system is basically a way to idiot proof the changing of the transaxle from low to high. The system works as such, if the transaxle is in neutral a tone sounds warning you that is the case.
I don’t need that level of safety system. I’m a pretty sharp guy. Well, I like to think I am, most of the time anyway. So a system so ripe with failure as this one was is probably not necessary for a guy “like me”. If low range is necessary, by God, I can promise you, I’ll make sure it is in LOW before I go. There are no safety circuits like this on a Defender or Series model, and now, there isn’t on my Range Rover.
So I cut the microswitch’s wires and applied a little bit of heat shrink to their ends so they would not short out anywhere. I also labeled them with my handy-dandy label maker. That way if I ever open this area up again I won’t look at those wires and wonder, “why the hell are those cut?”
And lastly I ground the surface rust off the floor pan on the passenger side, AGAIN. I have a picture of me using the angle grinder to remove rust from this floor pan in an earlier post. For some reason it must not have been enough grinding to remove the rust. It needed another round. This time I used the grinding disk and tore it back to metal. At this point you have to imagine that the floor pan is badly rusted. Pitting of the metal had set in and it looks pretty bad. I was careful not to grind it so much that I made the metal too thin.
I’m not 100% confident this will stay fixed over the life of this Range Rover. By the time we weld the replacement panels down this section will be pretty badly Frankensteened.
And rust, as much as I’d like to think I got rid of it, will appear again. I have decided to get a heat shield sound deadening material. There are too many options to choose from.
SecondSkin, Dynamat, FatMat, Lizardskin
I did some research and will probably get SecondSkin Damplifier Pro. The only thing that could have swayed me more to this product would have been bikini clad installers. But I’m glad they didn’t sink to that level to sell the product. At least I don’t think they haven’t sunk, there are only a hundred videos I haven’t quite looked at when you search second skin and bikini on YouTube.
That LuxuryLiner Pro product looks great too. Closed foam so you can count on water not sitting there promoting rust. I looked at the OEM foam liner and it is NOT closed foam. I could probably get away with just putting it back in. Consider that the metal floor will have the Damplifier Pro as a barrier so if the foam gets wet it will not be touching the floor pan. This will probably be a game time decision based on how much the players cost.
I’ve already talked to SecondSkin and will probably buy the materials next week and get them down as soon as I can get the welding, and painting and sealing done.
The layers will be as follows…
Carpet
Either OEM foam pad or LuxuryLiner Pro
Damplifier Pro
Spray on bedliner product
Rustoleum Paint
Metal
(Now we are outside the Rover)
Rustoleum Paint
Lots of spray on bedliner product
All of this preparation will probably fail so the more crap I pile on there the happier I’ll feel when I put the carpet down and attempt to forget about it. Its going to rust, I just need to slow it down until I’m too old to fix it or rich enough to buy something else to play with. Either way as long as Mrs. OkieRover’s legs don’t go poking out the floor it’s all good. My best friend used an aluminum speed limit sign he liberated from its duties managing the speed limit on some back county road as a floor pan in his 1962 Ford Falcon. I wish I had a picture of that. Maybe I’ll dig one up.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.