PICK-A-PART II and LAND ROVER IDENTIFICATION

One of the things you discover when you start a Land Rover restoration is that you can always do with more spare parts.  With this in mind, Garry and his brother Richard carried out another raid  took another trip north to our Land Rover source. 

Mobile phones have become one of the handiest gadgets and we used one to take photos of the Landies left behind as there were still a couple of items that Garry was thinking of changing on "Forrest".  It was handy to be able to refer to the photos and help job the memory of exactly what was still available.  By the time he contacted the owner to organize another visit, he'd already sold one of the Landies for $700.00.  Compared to what we have been paying him for parts, we think he got ripped off,  Mind you, he has so many cars and the place is so disorganized and messy, he really needs to be getting rid of stuff.  Anyway, we were still lucky enough to be able to get most of the things we wanted off the ones still left.

On Thursday, Garry continued stripping "Forrest" and removed the dashboard.  He was very pleased to discover there was no hidden rust.  We do have rust issues to deal with, it wouldn't be a Landy if it didn't have some rust, and believe me there are rust issues and then there are really bad rust issues.  Overall, our bulkhead is in pretty good nick.

Bulkhead

With dashboard removed.

Another job associated with Landy restoration is cleaning parts. 

Heater switch - before.

 And after soaking and more cleaning you end up with this.

Heater switch - after.

As you can see, we have a nice little stash of parts in reserve and lots more cleaning ahead of us.

Lately on the AULRO forum we've been reading about a member's search to discover where the serial number was stamped on his vehicle chassis.  There was usually a plate screwed or pop riveted to the bulkhead inside the cab.  If that is missing then the number could be stamped on the r/h spring hanger but just confuse things it could also be on the l/h rear spring hanger.  Then I discovered that UK Home market ones were on the RH front - Australian built ones on the spring hanger at the back of the LH rear spring.  Good to know.  The amount of knowledge in that forum never ceases to amaze me.

We used the Clifton Netherlands website to do some chassis searches when searching for information on year of manufacture for  "Forrest" and "Bev".  http://www.clifton.nl/index.html?calvin.html
We haven't managed to locate "Bev's" chassis stamp as yet but I'm sure it will be revealed once we start stripping her down.  We obtained her chassis number from the identification plate which is badly faded but visible with a bit of photo manipulation on a computer.

The plate below belongs to "Forrest".

And so does this front right hand spring hanger - no signs of any numbers stamped here, or have they been removed during repair.

While we were over at the shed last week continuing the strip down and giving "Forrest" a good wash and degrease, and while Garry was distracted with other things, I decided to check out the rear left hand side spring hanger to see if I could find anything there.  Lo and behold, it was very faint but definitely looked like numbers.  I called Garry over so he could confirm that my eyes weren't deceiving me and after a light scrub and a bit of a wash all was revealed.