Looking a Little Naked

missing bull bar

Since getting back from our French camping holiday, the 109 has been laid up for work.

The bulk of it centred around curing an oil leak from a failed gasket between the gear box and transfer box, which was not an inconsiderable amount of work.  It’s not interesting, though, and is only a rerun of work previously carried out, so I won’t expand on it.

The front suspension became very creaky while we were away,  particularly the bush at the rear end of the left spring.  I removed the springs to find the rear bushes to be in relatively poor shape, though the front bushes and chassis bushes were fine.  I have now replaced the spring bushes with orange Polybushes from the same kit I used to do the rear springs before the holiday.

Again, that was a boring job with little to show for it afterwards, so won’t be the subject of a long post.  Suffice to say that fitting polyurethane bushes isn’t anywhere as simple as advertised, needing a press or vice to insert their steel tubes into the fitted bushes.  I also found that on inserting the steel inner tube, the bushes would squeeze out a few mm like toothpaste.  This resulted in poor form and distortion to the outer faces, which would wear rapidly if allowed to stay that way.  Apparently, this is a common problem, and the solution was to cut away about 2mm from the inner end of each bush piece.  This resulted in a neat fit.

While I was at it, I decided to refinish the  now tarnished steering guard with Galvafroid spray.  I also drilled new holes for the spring bolts, moving the entire unit up 45mm so that its top edge is level with the bottom of the bumper (the height for normal chassis, rather than 1-Ton) – it always looked a little to low for my liking and had the potential of getting hung up on debris.  It’s still low enough to do its job, but is now much neater looking.

Of course, the work couldn’t end there.  The work around the front end showed a little corrosion making its way underneath the bumper’s paint, and the winch mount’s paint was flaking in places (bad adhesion between the Acid-8 etch primer and the zinc electroplating).  The areas of the winch mount that had previously been touched up with spray paint with no primer seemed to have much better adhesion, so once the bumper had been stripped right back, cleaned up and sprayed with Galvofroid, the two assemblies were sprayed with matt black Rustoleum.  So far, so good.

The bull bar was removed for this work, and it’s showing its age.  It had a few splits in the plastic coating which had allowed water ingress and a small amount of rust in a few areas.  Now that bull bars are no longer sold within Europe, it made sense to save this one before the damage was significant, so all the plastic has been stripped off with the use of a chisel and paint stripping heat gun.  My friend Alun is welding a few brackets to the stripped bar to allow me to hang the spot lights from the top (like on an A-bar), so that I can remove the lower middle bar to gain better access to the winch drum, and to attach brush wires (the stainless wires that run from bull bar to roof rack).  Once these brackets are on and the lower section removed, it’ll be media blasted and  either red-oxide sprayed or galvanised, depending on the verdict of the galvanisers of how many vent/drain holes need to be drilled prior to dipping, and where.  If it’s possible to galvanise it without it ending up like Swiss cheese, I’ll do so.  It’ll then be sprayed black and refit with the original spot lights.  It’s amazing how naked the front of the 109 looks without it, though.  I’ll be posting an article about overhauling the bull bar once the work has been done.