Sadness

Wow, has it really been nearly a year?

I've had a lot on my plate these last few months. I've been putting in a lot of work on my garden to get it sorted ready wife's birthday celebrations. 

That was a high point, the low point was saying goodbye to our best friend, Ben our retired greyhound. 

Very retired in that shot.

In November 2015 we found a lump on his tongue which was confirmed as being a tumour. The vets excised it as part of the biopsy but we knew it would come back. Unfortunately because of the location there was nothing we could really do for him. His welfare came before our needs and we decided it would be fairest to let him go. We're just grateful we had another 6 months with him. He was a true gentleman, goofy tea slurping, hole digging fool of a dog and we miss seeing his face every day. 

Racked up, stacked up

So the last pieces of the puzzle.

After fitting the light bar I later discovered the wind noise was actually from the bar itself, rather than the holes for the lights. It does sit a lot closer to the roof than the genuine one so the potential for noise is much greater. 

Years ago I rescued some tinted plexiglass from a skip at work, and I finally had a use for it. A few passes with jigsaw and sander and using some rubber sleeved cable clamps, I had a working wind deflector. Works brilliantly, keeping noise under control at suitable motorway speeds. 

I was tempted to get some white letters and brand it "PHOOL" (as homage to Thule) but decided against it.

The last thing to make was a roof rack extension, which links the rear rack to the light bar. 

Whilst not too bad to make (I must be getting better at this welding lark), I'm slightly disappointed as to how it connects to the rear rack. I was hoping for it to meet the crossbar on the front face, but I made an error with the cut and welded angled join at the front, making the bars run lower than planned. They still allow the sunroofs to open so it's not all bad.

It does look a bit "LETS OFF-ROAD!", but it's a belt and braces method of keeping the light bar in one place, and it also provides a route for the light wiring when I start on that.

If I need to remove the sunroof panels (I've not needed to so far) it's just a couple of bolts to undo / slacken.

The dreaded MOT

It's that time of year again, where I lose even more sleep than usual.

But she went straight through the MOT, well only just on the handbrake and a couple of advisories.

So dropped it off again today to have the handbrake sorted and a pair of new track rod ends. On collection the steering seems a lot nicer, and the handbrake also holds better than before. 

It's nice having a car that needs so little work that I can keep on top of it...

Sup G?

Well quite.

As previously written, G4 accessories are ridiculously expensive and ludicrously rare, such is the case of the 3DR roof light bar. 

Apparently only made for 9 event vehicles, for one stage of the G4 challenge (Brazil 2006), these bars are rarer than rocking unicorn shit.

A few owners have made their own versions, so I thought I'd make mine.

But first some groundwork.

I will use thin rubber to protect my paintwork, but I wanted a bit more protection. So I ordered some 3M DiNoc carbon fibre film and applied it to the roof between the rail finishers.

Although I am worried it looks a bit "Ricer", it does look ok and should do well against the odd scratch. I'll get some more at a later date and cover the paint between the sunroofs and the hardback too.

Under the rail finishers lie some folded seams, left over from when the sides were welded to the roof. Here is where we will attach the light bar.

Sure, a bit rough and will be painted before I finish.

I like the idea of removing the bar when not in use so I came up with a clamp that fits under the fold, with a finisher screwed on top.

As shown, the slot is manoeuvred under the fold and the cover screws on top. The cover is made to resemble the original rail finisher.

It evolved a little... And after a little thought I was worried about clearance to get a bolt and a screw into the front nut, so I welded a short length of stud to the nut (it's easier to get a nut on and lower the bar into position as its done up).

Now it was time to make the bar itself.

I bought a length of box section, and cut out a pair of U shaped feet from it. Shaping to make it look better and drilling it to match the clamp nuts.

Next up was a length of 27mm steel tube, to act as the light bar. This was bent slightly to follow the roofline. I made up some small brackets for the lights (I added a 5th one to the centre to mimick the antenna bracket found on the genuine item).

The centre one was welded to the centre part of the bar and all offered up to place. Once cut to length and the brackets modified to allow the bar to partially recess I tried it in place again and was pleased with the results.

The bar sits nice and low, lower than the original, so when the lights are fitted I should still have no worries with low barriers.

And it's fairly discreet. The carbon film helps this, but with lights attached it's obviously going to stand out some more.

Now to weld the bar together, at the correct angle for both curves of the roof. This was slightly problematic as I don't want to do any welding actually on the car, rather measure, mark and weld in the safe confines of my back garden.

This was achieved albeit with a small angle error on one of the feet, but prepared for this I glued some neoprene foam to the bottom to hide this sin (and protect the paintwork).

A few coats of lidl "hammer blow" paint and here we have it!

Painted, welded and lamp mounts welded too. I just need to get another pair of lamps and I'll make a start wiring it all together.

The clamps work well, the bar doesn't seem to be going anywhere when I pull it, and it's stayed on for a few journeys too. As it stands there is a bit of a low howl coming from the roof at approx 60mph. Although I expect some noise I'm hoping this is down to the empty mounting holes acting like pan pipes. Once the lamps are fitted the noise will hopefully disappear (and more hooefully not be replaced by more, different noise).

It's not your standard flashlight

This post is kinda EDC, kinda Freelander because I made it to go in the car.

After adding all those sockets to the car, what was I going to do with them? Well I had the parts to make a 12v maglite sitting around, so I put them to good use.

Years ago I installed a Terralux TLE-300 led assembly to my trusty maglite, along with a 3D cell to 9AA cell adaptor. This was a really nice bright light, but was massive to carry. 

Eventually smaller lights eclipsed the maglite in terms of brightness, so it was placed in the spares drawer but was always at the back of my mind.

So earlier this week I decided to shorten it, barely big enough to hold the switch which makes for an interesting stubby flashlight.

Or paperweight as there was no room for batteries. So I drilled the end cap and installed a DC connector, matched with an aux socket lead.

The result is a stubby 12v searchlight which outputs approx 600lumens at 12v. There are lower output levels too so as to add to its flexibility.

To put things in perspective, my favourite flashlight, and Eagletac D25C Ti (shown here next to the maglite) runs on 1 3.7v RCR123 and outputs approx 400lumens on turbo. And it's still smaller than the modded maglite.

But I'm not leaving that one in the car...

So how well does it work?

Pretty well I'd say, this is full power and I forgot just how bright this thing was. Because it's so small it's also manoeuvrable, so perfect for use in the car. 

Blackout

I can't claim any credit for this mod, it was mentioned on a Land Rover forum and I thought it was a good idea so I ran with it.

My cars dash is a kind of beige (I think LR call it grey but to my eyes it looks beige), and I the summer sun the instrument cowl reflects back onto the windscreen just enough to be noticeable. 

So forum users "dave21478" and "krisboats" posted about painting the cowl top black, and as it happens I have some Lidl Matt black in stock and I had to remove the cowl to fault find some wiring anyway.

Looks good and doesn't look out of place combined with the black tray tops. 

Ironic rain negating the need to mod...

And the fault finding? Turned out I had used some cheap fuses in my new fuse box that weren't quite making enough contact. Much swearing at such a silly fault but added some good fuses and all was well again...

Refused

So I was getting fed up with the auxiliary fuse box I'd fitted earlier. It just wasn't working out for a number of reasons. 

Firstly, if I needed to work on it I had to kneel down half in, half out of the drivers footwell and fiddle around with wiring at arms length. 

Secondly, the 6 circuits available were only permanent live, which meant if I had ancillaries that I wanted to be powered only when the ignition was on (the auxiliary sockets for example), I had to use inline fuse holders which went against the neatness of the fuse board.

I remembered my box of tricks that I removed from the campervan and dug out my trusty "Ripca" 12 way fuse board.

In the van I had all 12 circuits linked, so again they were all live regardless of the ignition, but is time I used a high current relay, triggered by the ignition live feed to switch one bank of fuses, giving me 6 permanent lives and 6 ignition lives. 

Perfect.

It all fits inside an adaptable box, with another van refugee, the isolator switch, and a load of multi connectors. 

The box is mounted inside one of the rear pockets, but I'm wondering if I could mount it direct to the side of the inner wing, and cut a Suitable hole in the side panel. That way may look neater and I might be able to still use the pocket for small items. 

Although I would still want the isolator easily accessible, so that would need to be moved. Something to consider. 

Now I can add circuits in a much easier fashion than before.