Installing the galvanising and electrics

There’s a few stories in this series of pictures.

The electrics have all been finished, tested and are working. Not a difficult job, but making all the connections is a bit tedious, and your fingers get very sore from twisting wires by the end of it.

Now, the hood sticks. Originally, the vehicle came with a hard top. One day I was driving out of the driveway, and someone in a passing car waved me down, and we started to have a chat about the Land Rover. I knew Lee vaguely, he lives in the next street and his daughter lives a few doors up from us. He asked me what sort of top I was going to put on it, and I told him I would love a soft top, but they were like hen’s teeth. Oh, says Lee, I’ve got a Land Rover soft top under the house, would you like it?

Well, you can imagine my answer. No problems say Lee; I’ll drop it off to you. So a few days later all the hood sticks turned up in the carport. They turned out to be from a LWB, but doing a conversion was a pretty straightforward task. I scored the canvas on eBay, for a very reasonable price, the only one I’ve ever seen turn up there.

Having got all the hood sticks sorted, I assembled all the galvanised bits and took them down to the nearest galvanisers in Sydney.

Thanks to Diana Alan for the bullet point list of things to look out for in a galvaniser – unfortunately, posted too late for me to be able to profit by themL.

• Check examples of their work before handing your parts to them.
• Best to do it in warm weather not cold as the zinc crystallizes to quickly in winter.
• Don't have it done first thing on a Monday as the bath may still be too cold, best at end of the day on a Wednesday or Thursday (Friday they may be too rushed to do a good job). So deliver it to them middle of a Monday if poss.
• Take the parts to the galvaniser as soon as possible after coming out of a molasses bath as the surface rust will appear within hours.
• Have the galvaniser skim the slag off the bath before dipping.
• Have the galvaniser centrifuge (spin) your parts when they come out of the bath. If they won’t centrifuge find another galvaniser.
• Re-galvanising can embrittle the part.

And if you want all the highlighted things above to go wrong, take your parts to a galvaniser close to the M7 in Sydney, who must remain un-named to protect the guilty. As an optional extra, they will also snap your hood sticks, and give you back some parts with the zinc coat peeling off in chunks.

I’ve also installed the roll bar, not that’ll it do any good if the vehicle rolls, but it’s OK to fasten the seat belts to, provided I’m not going too fast in the case of a collision.

So here’s a bunch of pictures with the electrics finished, all the galvanised parts fastened on, the hood sticks installed and the roll bar installed.