Land Rover Series IIA Restoration via roverhaul.com

It was tough trying to decide how to go with the rivets. After doing some seaching, I couldn't find anyone with the right rivets or toold. I just kept going back and forth with what we were going to do for a couple months. Then I finally found Jim Dix (http://www.bigflatsrivet.com/), he has all the hardware necessary to do the job perfectly.

I used a regular air chisel with the attachment I bought from Jim. The air chisel is a standard tool, you can get one at Home Depot. You can see it in the picture on my site, it's the smaller tool in the middle. Doing this right require two people.

First for the removal, the way we did it, was to take a very sharp chisel & basically knock off the parts of the rivets on the inside of the bed. Some would come off with one hit.

Then for the replacement, I lowered the air pressure in my compressor(not sure how necessary that was, just made me feel better, some of the early tests were a mess). Then with someone holding the larger bucking bar against the head of the rivet - flat against the outside body, I would hit the inside end of the rivet with the air tool a few times to create a rounded head on the inside. That's really all there was to it. What scared us for months was totally done in 30 minutes and turned out perfectly.

I used 3/16" Round Head Aluminum Rivets in two lengths, you can see pictures here.

The shorter rivets are used most, but for the rear where you have multiple layers of galv trim, I used the longer rivets & cut them to size.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions & good luck!

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Jim Dix is the owner there and was a great help in finding the proper 3/16" Round Head Aluminum Rivets. He also had the bucking bar and air chisel attachment we used in installing them.

On a side note, I recently was at the Land Rover factory in Solihull for their "Home of the Legend" tour. The restored Series III they had on display actually used pop-rivets, it looked very strange in comparison

Pictures from my installation:

http://www.roverhaul.com/galleries/galvtrim

Electrical via roverhaul.com
One upgrade I knew I was doing from the start was switching from a dynamo/generator to a modern alternator. I read all the pros & cons and found this to be the best way to go. We had to make a custom braket to hold it properly, and after painting that, it looked stock.

All of my wiring came from British Wiring, they have all the harnesses (in both PVC & cloth) along with all the other necessary items - bullets ends, connectors, properly colored wire, grommets, etc...

After initially getting the cloth harness, and having finished most of the systems on the car, the genuine high beam switch on the floor decided to short and fried most of the harness in the dash. It was a time crunch after that happened(was showing it that weekend), so I had to go with PVC for the replacement. When replacing it, we also added a lot more fuses. The original fuse box holds just two fuses; one for the dash lighting and one for the interior roof light. Not much protection. To make sure I didn't have to see think smoke pouring out of the dash again, I fused pretty much everything. The ignition wires each got one inside the dash. And in the engine compartment, we came up with a way to keep our new original Lucas fuse box and still add a fuse for each of those green wires. It looked cool and works great.

I also upgraded the headlights to use relays. They were simple to setup, and would have been done quickly, but a bad ground delayed us for probably an hour.

After fixing that initial bad ground issue, I decided to overkill the grounding too. Using some modern grounding straps from a Ford, I grounded each side of the rear lights to the chassis, the front grille, and one for the bulkhead too - that was in addition to the standard starter ground.

Going back to the alternator upgrade, it was very simple. The harness I ordered had the alternator mod already done. My modern CS130 alternator didn't work with the standard plug, so I ordered a CS130 harness and just soldered it into the engine harness. It worked great, I have my charge light working properly and it runs at 13.5 - 14V consistently.

For most of the soldering, we used a small butane torch, it was awesome. I didn't want to just crimp everything, so we soldered everywhere we need

Paint Removal

I've gotten a few emails asking about how we stripped the paint. In hindsight, this should have been the first thing we actually did. It wound up starting late into the project.

I initially had planned on having it all sandblasted. I heard it could be very bad, but the blaster I used said it shouldn't be a problem. He was wrong, and my seatbox was pretty messed up. They fixed that later at the body shop. Definitely don't try sandblasting. Then I found out about media blasting. One of the fenders was sent to be done and came out okay, but at that point we decided to just go with the chemicals.

We started with Airplane Stripper, they had it by the gallon at a local body shop supply store. Pep boys had it as well. They also had the aerosol version, which didn't work very well. You really need to be careful with this stuff, it smells terrible and burns the skin. I found that vinyl gloves used under heavy duty dishwashing gloves did a good job. But we went through quite a few. At first it's a novelty, you spread it on and it's cool to just see it start bubbling up. That looses it's charm pretty quickly. After scraping the paint goo, we'd switch to steel wool and sort of scrub off the rest. Sometimes that would take multiple coats of the Airplane Stripper.

I also found another product we used a lot of, it was a citrus aerosol stripper that did an awesome job. It was a little slower then the Airplane, but it smelled better and didn't burn nearly as much on the skin. While we only went through 2 1/2 gallons of Airplane Stripper, I probably bought about 20 cans of the citrus strip.

We also used a dual-action sander with a low grit and a wire wheel to get to the spots that the stripper wouldn't effect.

This was the same procedure for all the body parts and the galvanized trim. My trim had been painted over by a previous owner, so it looked pretty bad after the paint came off. Initially, I had planned on painting the galvanized trim using hammered paint, but realized that wouldn't look right.