Here’s a detailed write up of what has been going on.

The Chassis-

The chassis Has been welded up now and painted, It has rose joints on the links to the chassis offering a lot of movement compared to standard rubber bushes. The axles are off a range rover classic. I have used bespoke trailing arms at the rear and modified radius arms at the front. I have made mounts on the chassis to accept the radius arms and trailing arms and upper link for the rear axle, Plus new spring mounts on the axles and bespoke suspension turrets on the chassis. Also at the minute it has RR and LR coils (But i will be changing these for softer ones at a later date), the shocks are pro comp es9000,s. The suspension fully dislocates all round with my bespoke dislocation cones that i fabricated. Dazz kindly donated a power steering box from a Mercedes G-wagon as it was just the thing for the job. The chassis has been lengthened by 9″ as the sump was too close to the front diff for my liking. I have custom made the rear bumper/winch trey and purposely made it a little heavier than normal to compensate for the light body on the rear and heavy engine upfront. All the fuel lines and brake line are in. I’ve used braided hoses for the chassis to hub connections all round for the brakes. The main fuel and brake lines are made out of copper with the final fuel connections being standard rubber fuel hose.  I have made a bespoke propshaft for the front which has two wide angle UJ’s. To do this i had a piece of tube machined up to mate the daihatsu prop and slider to the rangey prop.

   
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No sound till I get a firewire lead for Ako’s Camera. And the power adaptor cos the batteries duff too.

Land Rover 300 TDi 100″ Hybrid

This vehicle has had a nut and bolt build by myself and has given me many miles of good service, proving to be faultless even under extreme conditions, as you can see it does have some knocks and scratches; this is a extreme competition vehicle not a shiny shopping car. The vehicle is ready to go on either navigational events or challenge events and I would be confident that I could fill it with fuel and drive it to Scotland and back. This vehicle is mechanically sound. This vehicle has cost me well in excesses of £12k to build plus 20 fully marked up maps of green lanes in Wales. Priceles (more…)

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The job of changing the front diff still fresh in my mind meant that there was a lot less throttle being used than normal and I was astounded where the Rangey would go on special tracks on a low throttle.

Driver error saw Shrek getting a good pasting on his rear roof quarter, but between us we collected some punches that I never thought we were going to get to. However we did get all of the punches apart from 22 and 19 that were in the stream in the bottom paddock, even though some of them took some lateral thinking to get them.
Having a sunroof helps on a Range Rover….

But the scale of the bog on the extreme area in the top paddock meant that we were unfortunately missing a few red ones from that area.

We walked the course, but as I nearly lost my wellies down there on foot I decided that a 2 ton Range rover wasn’t going to make it.

There was a tough punch near the fenceline that was in the middle of the bush, and driving to it would have meant falling in a very large boggy rut, but we solved that problem by driving into the bush and getting the punch through the sunroof again.

On reflection maybe I should have gone a class up into the modified and used my winch. but as Byron pointed out I would still be on the course now If I had done that…..

All in all this was a top Quality event, with a good turnout. I’m sorry I had to leave early before the prize giving, and I still don’t know who won at this moment but Dave had to get back to Southampton and time was catching us all up.

Thanks are in order, and I don’t know how many different people helped in different ways. So Byron and Trev, stand up take a bow and give yourselves a pat on the back for the organisation. I know many others helped especially Gaz, Calla and Pete and I pass our best wishes to you all. You helped make a fantastic challenge, and a great driving day.

The format of the comp will be simple. You turn up in what ever you want and we will put you in a suitable class.Each class as a chance to win a trophy and there will be a prize for the most outstanding team weather they win a trophy or not. There will punches out on site 30 in all with diffrent grades of diffculty. You will receive a punch card that as coloured numbers on it. Each colour refers to the difficulty of the punch. E.g Red = very difficult. Green= easy. There will be at least three special stages that all vehicles can do. Steve LLoyd may also set up a couple of stages as well but that is yet to be confirmed. The emphases will be on fun and good sportsmanship. We will be at shottle for the weekend, but Saturday the marshalls and orginizers will be the only ones allowed on site for setting out and Sunday the 15th for the challenge.

SEE YOU THERE …………IF YOU DARE ????

Hi guys, take a look at the trophies and medals for shottle. If you want to take 1 of these beauties home, you gotta work for it!! These should be in the club, so make it happen!!

The team that shows the best ‘team spirit’ as judged by the event officials on the day will also win this genuine ‘Snap On’ beer fridge, (courtesy of Brian Machin from Stoke), complete with ice cold beer of course!

GOOD LUCK TO YOU ALL, AND HAVE A GOOD FUN EVENT!!

I have had several reports of poor performance on this site. Some of it is of our making as we add pictures from events and builds in progress, but people want to see them!
We are looking at the server performance, (I called the host today and get the usual call centre in India…) but there are times when it simply isn’t available at all. I could not log in to the control panel at the hosts website today, so the whole job lot was down.
The club regards this level of performance as being very serious, and we are actively looking at moving the site to another host. So, in summary, please forgive any slowness at the moment, and rest assured that we are going to fix it, by moving if necessary. This will not affect the name of the site or any posts or pictures that are currently on it.

Regards

Mark