Day 3 ends & our 109 is in pieces

On Friday, November 20, 2009, I disassembled the rest of the 109. It was a 15 hour day.


By this time, we had several irons in the fire. The R380 and 5 speed adaptor kit were finally built and ready for shipment. New footwells and roof seals were on their way from Rovers North (http://www.roversnorth.com/). A complete, genuine Land Rover wiring harness was on order from England. Our bulkhead, T posts, core support and other parts were midway through the stripping process at American Metal Cleaning. And we had new door hinge hardware and other parts on order from Rovers Down South (http://www.roversdownsouth.com/).


With the expectation that alot of these parts would arrive in our hands just before or right after Thanksgiving, we needed to get the Sonoma 109 off our galvanized chassis (and moved onto our old 109 chassis just for storage/moving convenience). In anticipation of this day, Gord'n had cleared out a space for both 109s inside his shop. The Sonoma 109 was positioned under his hoist so that, when the time came, the entire body could be lifted (remember, only 8 bolts hold it to the galvanized chassis) and the two rolling chassis could be switched. Once the Sonoma 109 was on our old chassis, it would be rolled outside and serve as a temporary storage locker for all our body parts.





Gord'n had the temporary reassembly he did on our 109 undone in about 10 minutes and I got to work. The remaining disassembly went as follows:

1. The first parts to come off were the middle doors, the rear door and the seatbox.


2. Next was the middle bulkhead and middle floor. Five of the screws holding down the middle floor were frozen solid but an angle grinder took care of them pretty quickly.


3. The roof was next. I expected a real fight from most of the bolts here, but they came apart without much effort. Gord'n used his hoist and some ratchet straps to lift the roof off. While the roof is off, I will replace the rusty fasteners for the sunsheet with stainless fasteners. I am also going to remove the original headliner and install some sort of sound deadening headliner material.


4. The T-posts were removed next. This involved drilling out the rivets which attached the rear quarter panels to the posts and grinding through the bolts near the middle row seats as well as the triangular brackets that attached the posts to the chassis.


5. I removed the rear window/side panels next. After spending about two hours on the T-posts, it was nice to get the two panels off in about 20 minutes total.


6. The rear tub followed. By this time, it was around 8pm and we realized we would not get much farther so I unfastened the rear tub and we moved it forward on the chassis so that the gas tank could be removed. The Sonoma 109 did not come with a gas tank so ours will be installed in the galvanized chassis carrying with it the 1/4 tank of gas it had when we started this project.


7. The last step, since floor space is a precious commodity, was to stack all our parts back onto the chassis. I see a face in there somewhere!