[WIP] 1986 Ex-Military Land Rover 110 - GS450H

[LRBen]

Done a bit more CAD work as well. Adaptor to go from GS450H box to the transfer box is mostly designed. Need to decide if I am going to keep the rubber donut or not. If I use it then I might not have enough space for the battery box with ID3/4 modules in the front. At least not without a redesign of the battery box, which will probably happen anyway.

[LRBen]

Got the chassis back from paint over the weekend, then sprayed it full of Lanoguard and hung it up out of the way.

This project will be taking a slight pause on the chassis build up front at least. Currently have a seperate battery swap project ongoing for someone else, then I'm planning to put in the final battery on the tractor as I want to take that to a show in January.

I'll still be working on the GS450H to transfer box coupling in the meantime. So hopefully when I get back to the chassis build up there will be no delays and I can slot the GS450H motor straight in.

[LRBen]

Back on the Land Rover again for the moment, in-between new tractor battery build, bits of which you can see in the background below.

Axles rebuilt over Christmas, new brakes, bearings, seals etc. Put the chassis on the axles today so now we are at the rolling chassis stage!
Still quite a bit more to do of course, but one of these days I'll actually get to the EV conversion part of this thread.
Next step here is to finish off all the suspension parts, then I'm a bit split on how much of the body I want to put on and in what condition before playing with mounting the GS450H.

[LRBen]

I've managed to figure out where most of the chassis brackets were meant to go in the last couple of weeks so it's looking a bit more like a complete rolling chassis now. Steering box is going on next week when the bolts arrive as well as the rear shocks.

I did a small mock up of the transfer box with the printed adaptor plate and it looks quite good initially. I think I'm going to gut out the rest of that spare gearbox and then start to look at mounting brackets. Although this probably won't happen for a little while as I really do need to focus on the tractor battery swap!

In the meantime at home I have been looking into dashboard displays. The original warning light cluster I sold off as last year I was going to place a tablet behind the dash. But I don't really like that idea anymore so I've decided to design a replacement light cluster with LEDs on a PCB. Given I'm designing it from scratch I also rearranged some of the warning light locations and changed some of the ICE warning lights to EV lights. So I'll have a run mode indicator, as well as a HV fault and charging indicator light.

This is my first printed test plate with the original warning light layout.

Current state of the PCB design, not too far off now.

[LRBen]

Dashboard PCBs arrived last week. Brightness on the green is a little too much but nothing we can't work around. Next I need to figure out making a custom facia plate.

[LRBen]

With the tractor more or less functional I've gone back to the Land Rover. Which means more rust of course. This time on the bulkhead, the foot wells on both sides are pretty bad, as are the top corners. Cut away all the rust and this is what I have to work with. Patched most of this up today and then ran out of gas. So next week I will finish these off and replace the foot wells with some repair panels.

With the bulkhead patched I will then move finally on to some conversion work again. I printed the test adaptor plate off in PLA over winter, so I have been looking at getting that made up in steel. Current plan is as follows.

I did try looking for a steel tube but that's quite hard to find in a not 2.5 meter length. So copying the tractor design and using many 10mm plates indexed together with dowls.
The final distance hasn't been decided yet, might put in an bearing for the shaft but I'm not sure that's needed. Also still undecided on using the rubber donut or not. Using it will mean a battery box with VW modules won't fit in front of the GS450H in the engine bay.

I've also been looking into user interface, watched allot of Garage Tinkering and Upir on youtube who both have some great ideas. Made this prototype below based on Upir's designs and a 1.28 inch screen. However Garage Tinkering have some 2.1 inch screens with custom backboards in development that should fill the gap better, these will also have can inputs on the boards already so I'm going to have three of those.
For the Speedo I think I'm going to try and find a 4 inch circular screen and have a digital Speedo. The Speedo was originally cable driven from the LT230, however in later models they used a transducer for the modern dashboard which will plug straight into any age LT230. So I can use one of those to give a digital readout some accurate speed data.