Description
By: Richard Green and R.M.Clarke .
As anyone who owns an elderly Land Rover knows, taking it apart and putting it back together again are not just things you do to keep it on the road; they are part of the fun of ownership. They aren't always as much fun as they could be, though. When the workshop manual tells you that reassembly is the reverse of dismantling, it doesn't tell you all the things that an experienced Land-Rover mechanic would if he were watching over your shoulder. Finding out the hard way that reassembly is just a tiny bit more complicated than the manual suggests can be one of the less enjoyable aspects of playing with a Land Rover.
For that reason, a lot of people were only too pleased to read David Bowyer's series of articles on rebuilding a Series III model in Land Rover Owner. These articles told the plain truth about the problems of dismantling and reassembly, in the words of someone who had done the job. The only problem was, if you were following the sequence through from start to finish, you had to wait a month between each of the episodes. Now that Brooklands Books have republished the whole series in a single volume, a whole lot more people are going to be able to benefit from it .... and they won't have to wait fourteen months to read the final episode, either!
That isn't all, though. In this book, the staff of LRO have pulled together a fine collection of other how-to articles from the magazine. If you want to know about towing, tracking, winching or cylinder head conversion or even more ambitiously, want to drop in a V8 engine try reading articles written by those who've actually done it. It's almost as good as having that experienced Land Rover mechanic looking over your shoulder.
James Taylor
