Land Rover109 oil catch tank

It's working!!!!

I've just been driving around not paying much attention to it thinking it wasn't working but LOOK^^^ it is! That is after about 200 miles of driving, not much at freeway speeds. I have not drained it yet. I plan on filtering the first couple of drainings(checking for drill shavings) and putting it back in the motor. Once I am convinced it is clean it will all go back in the motor.
It feels better to know I'm not just spewing it out everywhere (and all over the back of my 109!) wasting oil and money.

If you haven't figured it out the black stuff in the sight guage is oil from the rocker cover.

   Update;

Wow is it working. I drove about 100 miles at freeway speeds and the tank filled up and overflowed into the discharge hose. Then spewed drips all over the back of my 109.
To fix it I needed to plumb the drain into the sump. The 1/4" tank flange was purchased at The Hose Shop along with a 1/4x1/4' barb and a plug. The oil sump was pulled and cleaned and I drilled-ground out a 1" hole. My friend and fellow Roverite Brett, http://www.gottdenerdesigns.com/index.html  welded on the flange. My poor placement of the hole(Hey, I just followed the online drawing!) made it difficult to get the tig welder in there and the brazing under the weld is leaking oil.
    After that was all done the sump reinstalled and the barb put on showed that the barb was too long and the hose would not clear the front driveshaft.

     A barb with a 90 was procured and exchanged for the straight one. The hoses hooked up and the drain valve opened.

   I can't rotate the pics, sorry. Anywho on the last freeway run it appears to work perfectly. The rear of the 109 showed no oil vapor after 120 miles of freeway driving and at least when the motor is off the oil drains back into the sump. After stopping I never saw any oil in the tank. One issue hopefully solved!

109 Land Rover driving the Roamerdrive

  After installing the Roamerdrive I had to go for a drive.

From my house I headed up into the mountains and the shifting was a little notchy at first. I went about 10 miles and figured I needed to look under the rig and see if anything was leaking. So I pulled over in a turnout overlooking the Monterey Bay and looked under. Only to see a drip, drip, drip coming from the drain plug on the Xfer case.
   Since I had reused the crushwasher I figured that was the culprit. A quick turn with a wrench showed no improvement so I decided to head home. It would have to be drained to replace the crush washer.
   I got home and put a bucket under then went insearch of a washer. I didn't have one!!!!

   Using my motorcycle, a 2008 Vstrom, I headed the 13 miles into town, stopping at the FLAPS with no luck, to The Hose Shop which I figured surely must have the right washer. But no joy. Next I headed over to the local Brit car repair shop and after and extensive search by 2 employees, no joy. :-(
   Lastly I headed over to my friend Mike who owns Andy's Auto Supply. Mike found a washer which fit from the master brake cylinder for some car. I bought 2 and went home to see how much oil was left in the case.
   To my surprise not much had leaked out. Maybe enough to cover a dollar bill was in the bottom of the bucket. But not for long! I opened the drain plug and let the oil out, while that was happening I installed a different drain plug with the new washer. Then put the oil back in the Xfer case. By now it was close to dark.

    The next day I went out and there were no drips on the drain plug! YAAAY!!!!! I hopped in and started my break-in drive over. Once again stopping at the same turnout to check for leaks, there were none, I was so chuffed!!! I commenced up Hwy 9 to Hwy 35 and turned left towards San Francisco just crusing thru the redwoods and open spaces on the ridgeline all the way to Hwy 92.
   At 92 again a left turn and I was on my way to Half Moon Bay. The Roamerdrive was shifting well and quieter than the Fairey it replaced. In HMB I went to lunch with friend Brian then hit Hwy 1 South back towards Santa Cruz.
    This was a little faster road being mostly rolling terrain with a posted 55 speed limit. Fine for me I am not a speed demon anyway. The 2.5DT pulled the hills well even in od, there was no problem keeping up with traffic and noise level tolerable with out earplugs, but I do have bad hearing to begin with........
    After a brief slowdown at Pigeon Point(I forgot my camera) I was cruzing past Ano Nuevo and Big Slide in Santa Cruz.
    I passed a truck at one point in a passing zone, my gps showed my max speed there to be 67mph. Then I came into Santa Cruz. As the 109 rolled up to the second stop light I pushed in the clutch to shift out of od and this terrible screeching noise erupted! It was like fingernails on the blackboard only 30 times louder!
   Quickly thinking the worst I moved towards the shoulder, as the rover slowed the noise stopped. While sitting awaiting the light I checked the od--yes, out--mainbox--yes, in gear---let out clutch---car moves forward. So the tranny still works and no noise.
    Still not convinced when the light turned green I made the right turn. Drove to the first left and went down the street. Every thing shifted fine and there was no noise. But I did decide to take a slower street thru town. So I made another left and headed for it when the noise came back,,,,,Horrendous screeching!!!!!!!! But it stopped when I went to neutral. My thoughts went to the tranny again.
   Still deciding to go home, after all the motor and gearbox seemed to work fine, we headed down the slower street. At first there was no noise again then after a mile or so it started to become intermitent. It continued in this fashion up Hwy 9 thru Felton and there I could see the needle on the speedo dancing in time with the noise. So I figured either the speedo was going or the cable. Around 3 miles later in Ben Lomond the noise stopped, a look at the speedo showed the needle at 0.
    Once home the dash pulled and the speedo removed showed the cable connector to be frozen. So I removed the innards from the speedo and using some Triflow and leverage on the magnet I got the connector freed up.

Top pic shows the cable connector.

Bottom shows the magnet which I levered to get it to spin.

   I hooked an old bit of speedo cable to my drill to make lubrication easier and check function.

   Next up was checking the cable. This has to be the most miserable job on a Landy! Oh, you can get the 3 screws off easy enough, showing the broken cable still stuck in the speedo drive.

    It is putting it all back together that is frustrating, must have taken me a half an hour just to get the first screw in, my hands are just too big(short fingers and wide palms). Eventually it was done though. The dash put back together and a test drive done, all's well again. I wonder if the curve in the cable by the oil dipstick on the Xfer case had anything to do with it.
   I did refuel and doing the mileage check showed that I got 22.3mpg.

Land Rover 109 gets a Roamerdrive

   A couple of weeks ago I sold my 93 Range Rover LWB to the parents of a friend. It has moved on to the greater LA area. With the money from the sale I purchased a Roamerdrive (formerly Roverdrive) from Ray Wood at Global Roamer. http://roamerdrive.com/
   This overdrive offers the same basic gear reduction as the Fairey but with updated technology. While the Fairey uses helical cut and straight cut gears the Roamerdrive uses a planetary gear drive such as used in automatic transmissions. It is also used as the final drive at the wheel on the big Caterpillar dump trucks. The other major difference is the Fairey uses 90wt and has it's own separate oil supply while the Roamerdrive uses 75-90 synthetic GL-4 oil which it shares with the Xfer box keeping the od cooler.
   After a bit of fumbling with my bank on the international purchase, Global Roamer is in British Columbia, Canada, my od was shipped and recieved.

   I also got the redesigned Xfer case bottom cover designed to reduce leakage and increase cooling.

   Soon I set about removing the Fairey I had lifted from Ignotus my 88. That took some time but was fairly easy. The mainshaft nut was removed and the roller bearing taken off.

Then the new drive set up was installed with the well thought out tools provided by Global Roamer.

    The nut on the mainshaft gets torqued to 110ftlb so you need to put it in gear and block the engine from turning with the crank handle braced by a jack stand or something.

There is a very good instruction booklet included regarding the installation. I did have 1 final issue with the install. My od lever and the maingearbox lever wanted to occupy the same time space continuim when in 4th and od. An email to Ray and he said it was unusual(more on that later) but just bend it out of the way. So I was back and forth a bit bending and installing checking that it wouldn't interfer with 3rd over. I wound up with 2 bends.

    With the kit came a Xfer case oil dipstick, which you put on prior to the Roamerdrive. This I did. I have the low gear Xfer case with the big intermediate gear shaft. This case has the small oil fill/check port. So I couldn't use the adapter to get the dipstick tube quite out of the way of the speedo cable as it exits the tranny. There is a pretty good bend there. I don't know but perhaps the difference in this case made the interference with the main gearbox. The only other minor issue was with the screw holding the tunnel being too long and interfering with the lever bracket. I installed 2 thick washers to move it about 1/4" out.

     All buttoned up and ready to go!

Land Rover 109 rear door stop

    On another front I was lots more successful with making a door stop to hold the rear door open when it is on the uphill side. I got the idea the other day at my daughters when I used a piece of wood to hold it open.

   I used a 23"x1/2" square tubing I had. It was the right size for what I had in mind. Somewhere over the years I had aquired 2 3/8" drive universal joints. I took one and it fit perfectly into the ID of the tubing. So I took the UJ apart and ground down a 1/4-20 nut and welded it on the drive end of the UJ.

Then using that I could position it and locate a place for a hole in the rear door inside panel. Mine is made of steel so I'm not too worried about the stress.

Once the hole was located and drilled I could find the length for the leg by jamming it into the corner of my reciever hitch.

Then with that length determined I welded the square end of the UJ into the tubing. Next up was determining how to hold the leg out of the way when not needed. At first I thought it would just fit flat against the door but the UJ prevented that. So I resorted to using 2 crank handle clips I had lying about. These were installed with 10-32 rivnuts.

Pleased with how it was all going to work I painted the leg with truckbed liner and let it dry overnight. Below are the finished pictures!

   So now it's been awhile since I did this and I have an update; Apparently I cut the rod too short but not by much. The situation arose when I drove the 109 with the doop propped open, well the door swung open a little more and the rod dropped off the reciever hitch. No biggie, nothing broke.
   It took me awhile but I figured out a solution to keep the end in place after rejecting many ideas on modifing the reciever with some kind of capture device. It came to me that I already had one in the hitch keeper pin.
    A fairly simple job to figure out the correct angle and length of the 1"x1/8" flat stock and cut the rod and weld it up. It still fits in the door clamp too!

Land Rover oil catch tank

   Well,  I drove my 109 on the highway about 80mi. a few weeks ago. When I got to my destination the back of the car was covered in oil droplets. These had been swept up in the vacuum behind the 109 after being emitted from the rocker cover breather hose I had vented to atmosphere. It exits the RH of the rear crossmember.  Embarrassing!
    So I bought a plastic oil cyclone thingy and put it inline under the frame rail as a test with the same results. Now I went online and asked for help and found an aluminium catch tank from Darton Fabrication in the UK. http://www.dartonfabrications.com/  I only just installed it yesterday but I'm not impressed with just the 2 mile run into town and back. when I got home under idle I could still see vapor puffing out the hose.....

    Anywho, on with the installation story.

I decided to put it on the RH inner wing where it was easy to hook up the hoses, had room to drain the tank.
There was a bracket to make so I did that with a 2" wide bit of alli I had.

 I drilled holes and installed rivnuts in the bracket and used 1/4-20 ss bolts to attach. I did the same on the inner wing.

   Once I was satisfied by trial fit that it would work out. I went to The Hose Shop and purchased a 90 and a valve and a barb for draining the tank.

   This was all put together and the hoses attached top(inlet) and bottom (outlet).

Anyway it looks nice I just wish it cured my issue, maybe I'll see when I do another highway run. Not holding my breath though!