Propane tank mount for 109, page 2

OK that was weird. Sorry out of my control.

When we last left out intrepid hero fabricator it was late afternoon on 21 May 2020 he was in the process of bending up an arc for his propane mount.

This was then deemed too short and another made......then welded into place. Ahh such is prototyping.....

Here is how the tank sits in the mount;

I had to clean up the looks of the mount and remove the dangerous sharp corners so I scribed an arc in the bottom.

And using my angle grinder and belt sander on my belt/disc sander made a passable looking shape.

How it will sit under the tank;

Time came to drill the holes in the strut for the mount. I had only put 3/32" holes in the brackets as I had them all matched up and drilled at the same time, I also marked and bent then all the same. You can see the mark on the strut for where the base of the mount was to go. Well I didn't realize it but I had the mount in the wrong position and drilled the holes too low.

As evening descended I finished off by painting every thing a loverly shade of flat black.

22 May 2020

     Alright the paint was dry, now I needed some vibration dampers and wear prevention. Looking around I have this box of grommets and I got the thickest ones and drilled holes in the mount right at the weld line of the tank, and put in the grommets these happen to be 5/8" holes.

grommeted;

 Now I needed to have some sort of restraining system, again thinking of some sort of big hose clamp kinda thing that would be lockable. Here is how the mount now looked on the 109;

 I also decided to add some anti vibration to the base arc. You can also see the grommet I put in the strut to keep it from vibrating on the tub capping.

My neighbor John came over and noticed it was too low and would not clear the tire as intended. You can see that the tank would now hit the tire if it was in the bracket. I am stumped as to how this happened. It was an easy fix though, by moving the bottom bolt up to the top hole I could re-drill the top hole. This put my bracket about an inch, inch and a half higher.

After all that I still needed some kind or restraining set up for the top.

Noticing that the tank top had some holes drilled in it got me to thinking( I know, dangerous!) what if I could make some sort of clamp that could latch through the hole? No, no can't figure anything out. How about if I just run a bolt through the hole? That might work!

   I found a piece of 1/4" plate I had and shaped it to fit the inside of the strut. In the middle I drilled a hole, at first I was going for a 5/16's bolt size but because I didn't have any long enough I obtained a 3/8's bolt from John and drilled to fit that. I also had to sand down the thickness of the bolt head to get it and the 1/4" block to fit in the strut. And here is where a couple of thing popped up to bite me. The first was the block was too wide and needed more sanding to fit more than 2 inches up the strut, second; where I welded the strut together on the inside,,,,I had to use my dremel tool to grind off the weld so the block would pass, on the sides as well as the bottom and it took multiple tries. Eventually I got it to slide easily the full length of the strut.
     Then I re-assembled the mount with the bolt above it to test fit my fine design!

That is when I discovered the 1/4" block I had made was too large and wouldn't let the bolt travel far enough up the strut to line up with the hole in the tank handle by about a quarter of an inch.........

Disappointed and at the end of the day and my will to persevere I called it quits.

23 May 2020

 Bright eyed and full of Columbian dark roast I hit it in the morning. Once again taking off the bottom strut nut, taking both bolts out of the mount and sliding the top bolt down...damn what now! Oh, forgot to remove the center grommet in the strut,  I got the bolt out.
   Put it in the vise and used a cut-off wheel to remove 1/4 inch from the top and bottom. That heated it up so the paint dried quickly and I put it all back together. This time the bolt lined up!

What I would do differently, use a 1/2-5/8" for the top c clamp out of heavier material, use a 1 piece strut so I won't worry about the weld failing. I will probably get a section next time I go to Home Depot at 20 miles it's the closest place. Around $20 for 10 feet.

It's been one day and the tank is not filled, I did start the 109 and check for vibration and it is no worse than anything else and makes no noise.

24 May 2020

Cripes!  I went out this morning and took the tank off, That is when I realized the bolt would just jiggle around making noise when at idle or driving without a tank on.    POO! What to do? At first I thought, slide some rubber hose over the bolt! Easy peasy! Done! But wait, there's more! It wasn't the bolt so much making the noise as the steel block in the strut I welded the bolt to! Rattle, rattle, rattle........hummmmmmmmm. Thinking cap is on.........................

IDEA!  Bolt the top mount to the support when not in use!  hmmmmm, no th bolt is too long, not enough threads. I needed a tube or something to tension the nut against the strut.

IDEA #2, How about spring pressure? That could work.

I marked a 3/8" circle(size of the bolt) under the bolt on the support.

Then it was step drilled and dremeled out to fit

I had a stainless steel spring laying about that fit the bill nicely, so with a thick square washer in the back and the nut on the front. Viola! One less rattle!

 And the spring stays on the bolt when the tank is mounted, a +.

8 June 2020  Update;

   I went grocery shopping this morning and when I got back to Fluffy I opened the rear door and went to put in the strut in place, only to find that it didn't fit it was too long,? WTF?? Investigating further showed the door wasn't opening as far as before. The spare tire was hitting the new propane strut.......poop!

So I spent an hour and a half cutting the door strut down and re-welding it to fit.

Now the tire doesn't hit.

Then I had to move the door clamp for the strut, since it was now shorter.

All done------I hope......

Land Rover 109 propane tank mount

20 May 2020

Well you knew it was coming, right? If I went ahead and converted the white gas stove I'd have to get a tank or deal with all those 1# bottles. So after some forum discussion I went for the 5# tank and a 12' hose.

Then I had to decide where to put the bloody thing! Some of my considerations were; must be outside if possible, accessible to the stove (also the reason for the 12' hose) and the little buddy heater, out of the way from a car accident. Since I do not have rear side windows I chose this spot out back if I could make it work.

The tank will fit there.

Going online I looked at propane tank mounts and nothing seemed ready made for my spot. I loath to put holes in my body for several reasons and wasn't sure the skin on the roofside would hold a full bottle bouncing around the countryside. I looked for, like a rollbar mount but didn't find one, there were some DIY ones though.

     What I came up with was a piece of superstrut that I could make a clamp for the raingutter at the top.

So wielding a hammer I bent a piece of 1/8" x 2" into a 3/4" "C", this I put 2 holes into the top section for 1/4" bolts. 

Some fine tuning of the depth had to be done for it to fit right on the gutter, it was then welded to the strut.

And test fit where even MORE fiddling took place to get the depth right.

I welded 2, 1/4-20 nuts to the c clamp and fitted it.

But that just left me hanging on how to attach the bottom.

I was hoping to find some close ready bolts to make some sort of bracket to attach to so I wouldn't drill any holes, but NOTHING was close, I settled with the idea of drilling out 2 of the capping poprivets and installing riv-nuts--see the red circles in the pic below.

BUT I REALLY DID NOT WANT TO PUT ANY HOLES IN... I took a break and had a think, what was needed was a support from the grab handle on the rear crossmember.

I didn't have a piece of strut that went the full distance though. So I cleaned up one end of the piece I had with my new to me disc sander.

And used it to lengthen the section with the c clamp on top.

This gave me plenty to make the length I needed.

While that was hanging there, I saw that a bracket coming off the tub mount would be a better/easier/cleaner design. Again using the 1/8" x 2" stock I had, I cut a 4.25" length, marked the holes and drilled 5/16" holes.

Once held in place on the tub I could mark it for the bolt hole for the strut. I was drilling the hole for the bolt when I realized that this won't work as the bolt would have to penetrate the body. POO!......

OK then let's put the bolt in from the other side and weld it on! This I did using a 5/16-18 x 1" bolt.

Here is what it all looks like bolted up.

That took care of day 1.....lots of unbolting and fiddling and more bolting and unbolting and welding and grinding and cleaning and bolting and painting and did I mention bolting?

21 May 2020

    Originally I thought I could get away with just some sort of clampy thing like a big hose clamp and the tank would nestle in the recess of the strut and not wiggle around. It didn't take too long to see the weld on the side of the tank wouldn't let that happen. I needed a real support!

   Again I went to the web and looked at tank mounts, I found one that had some slots cut in it to hold the leg(?) of the tank and I thought I could do something like this pretty easy. What I needed was some 3/16" x 1.25" flat stock. I didn't have any, in fact I didn't have any 3/16" anything and due to the pandemic everyone is closed.

Time for a rethink, methinks.

Mucking about in my metal stash I found a piece if 15ga big enough to make a shelf bracket out of. Sadly, I didn't take any pics of the bending process as I got too involved mentally. I also had to make up some, (4) angles for brackets out of 1/8 "x 1/2" flat bar I had. I used a section of strut to hold the angle brackets in place and tacked them on.

Only one of them had one side askew and had to be redone. Here is what the front looked like;

Of course it was all eyeball and guesswork. I marked the position of the mount on the strut and proceeded to drill the holes for it.

I knew from my online research that I should have some sort of retention system for the leg of the tank. I decided that I would make an arc out of some 1/8" x 1/2" flat to weld on the base. I used the leg of the tank for the shape first the outside and then using clamps to pull it into shape on the inside.

Hmmmmm, not run into this before, looks like I may have to do a second page, won't let me text past the next picture!

Link to page 2;   https://poppageno.blogspot.com/2020/05/propane-tank-mount-for-109-page-2.html