Vauxhall Chevettes with different engines.

[Paul-R]

Fabulous. I would have loved to look at that.

[mickthemaverick]

My father had a mate who was an RAF Squadron Leader and he owned a Jaguar XK150 I believe it was (may have been a 120 my father was not great on cars!). During the war and petrol rationing he substituted the engine with one from a lawnmower and drove the car at a maximum 12 mph for nearly 5 years. Then when the war was over but rationing still going on he refitted the original engine and toured the country using his saved up ration coupons!!

[bobins]

The idea predated the Sherpa as I was shown (by the same guy who did the Perkins conversion) this idea on a diesel Land Rover of some kind. He was think of putting this into the Jag.

An MOT tester once failed my Land Rover because he couldn't get a reaction out of the servo when he started the engine. I opened the bonnet and pointed to the brake master cylinder and said "That's because it hasn't got one". He was stumped, he'd never seen that before and thought I'd removed it at some point

[Peter.N.]

None of my early cars had power brakes or steering, probably not for 10 or 15 years. My first one didn't even have a heater! The steering was still fairly light on some of them because it was low geared. A friend of mine had an elderly Humber Super Snipe with a 4 litre engine and that was amazingly light once you started moving.

The early brakes were not bad either, the vauxhall Cresta's I used to run stopped very well - until you got the brakes hot - then it was difficult to stop at all. The first car I drove with disc brakes was a Super Minx, the brakes didn't fade but you had to use both feet to stop it - it had no servo.

Peter

[Paul-R]

Ha! MOT testers, eh?

My brother took his Land Rover Defender for its MOT test and came away with a pass but a whole list of advisories one of which was a slight leak from his power steering. The problem? No power steering fitted to his car of course!

They wouldn't take it off the certificate even when he pointed this out to them.

[Hell Razor5543]

Ha! MOT testers, eh?

My brother took his Land Rover Defender for its MOT test and came away with a pass but a whole list of advisories one of which was a slight leak from his power steering. The problem? No power steering fitted to his car of course!

They wouldn't take it off the certificate even when he pointed this out to them.

Hmmm. I wonder if the DVLA (upon looking this Land Rover up on their data base) would then question the competence of that MoT tester? Might be worth querying it with them (something along the lines of "I received an advisory notice on the MoT certificate about a leak from the power steering that does not exist on the vehicle in question. Surely this is incorrect?").

[Peter.N.]

The first car I had with ABS was a CX Safari, I don't think the tester had come across ABS before, or at least not often my previous Safaris didn't have it. There was a great debate as to whether it had to work if it was fitted, I think they eventually passed the car without it working.

Peter

[Paul-R]

A couple of photos. First one shows the Ford rear axle with GpIV Chevette brackets welded on. You can see the 3l Capri rear brake drum clearly. There's a strengthening bracket (a bit of angle iron!) welded on for extra strength to resist bending. IIRC the diff contains an LSD of some kind. Somewhere underneath all that is the shaved 4HA axle that I took off the Mk2 Jag.

On the lower left of the photo is the front crossmember that I converted to GpIV specification.

A slightly better photo of the front crossmember.