Series Land Rover gear lever seal option

Well, first off Happy New Year!

Secondly , proud to say as of this moment I have has 45,257 page views! Thanks to all my interested readers, I hope you find the content informative. Plus thanks to the Russian and Chinese bots hitting my pages and getting the numbers higher than they really are. ;^)

   Now on to the main reason for the post.

   If you are a regular reader you will know that I have been chasing and just found and rectified a mysterious noise with the tire tread.

   As a result of that I have gone on to try to finish up the sealing of the cab. mainly I needed to do the seals on the Roamer Drive and main gear levers. I had left these off for a couple of reasons, on the RD lever I just didn't want to have to put it on and take it off again and the one I had was not a good fit. Plus sometimes when idling there was a high pitch squeeking noise that was alleviated by putting pressure on the lever. By accident I found it was the tunnel cover mounting screws. I found a piece of leather and cut a hole to fit the RD lever pivot and then adapted the rest to fit the hole and clamping ring I already had. The leather stretched nicely over the oblong shape of the pivot.

After doing that is when I found that the screw mounting the tunnel cover were vibrating against the RD lever bracket. I cut down the screw in the above pic and tightened the screws on the other side and the squeeking noise has gone away!

     I drove it a few days that way before realizing that I could do the same thing to the main gear lever. It really quieted the cab by just doing the RD seal and the screws!!!

MAIN GEAR LEVER;

    I'm not sure why things are off but my main lever does not sit centered in the tunnel hole, despite all my measurements and checking mounts, both transmission and engine. Something's off somewhere. Here are some looks at the lever and how the rubber seal(boot) part #301437, don't fit. I even tried removing part of the edge on the seal to get it to fit

   First I knew I would need to make a clamping ring for the new seal, I was going to just make one using an old tunnel as a template, then I remembered an old junker tunnel I had and decided to just cut it up for the ring. So I marked it and cut it with my angle grinder.

.   I then took a hammer to it and flattened out the edges and defects, plus a quick run on the wire wheel for some clean up. After that it was a couple of trips out to the rover to figure out the OD(outside diameter) and cut it to fit.

Once I had the size of the clamp I set about to make the leather seal, I used the rubber seal(boot) to draw a circle on the leather and used scissors to cut it out. I did the inside of the drawn circle figuring I wanted to make it too small rather than too large, but it turned out perfect with the stretch of the leather.

Then I had to figure out the position of the clamp and the OD of the seal. It was kinda complicated trying to find the ID of the tunnel hole and lining up the ID of the clamp and holding it all in place to draw the outline.

   Finally I had the leather seal cut out and with three screw holes pre-drilled(1/16") in the clamp I could position the clamp and seal on the tunnel and drill the tunnel cover and seal for the clamping ring. After locating all the holes I used larger holes in the clamp to fit the screws and at the same time used a leather punch to make the holes in the leather seal. The tunnel holes were drilled to fit the sheet metal screw I had for mounting.

   I finished cleaning up and painting the new clamping ring using some CAT yellow spray paint then trimmed the opening with some press on trim. I got the trim from https://www.banggood.com/3m-Long-Rubber-Sealing-Strip-Edge-Protector-Anti-scratch-U-Type-for-Door-Window-p-1161221.html?p=0504057182682201611O&cur_warehouse=CN

It is still off center, but looks better and keeps soooo much more of the noise out!

Part of what got me going on this was the transmission brake rubber, mine has deteriorated in no time due probably cheap production components. I took it off and just glued some vinyl to the outside as a temporary fix. It looks like crap but is keeping out the noise and wind. I don"t know how long the Gorilla glue will keep the rubber and vinyl together. Now if I could just figure out a "better" seal for that...............