When I finished building my 88” wheel-base Range Rover / Land Rover hybrid in January 2004 I just wanted to get it running and on the road.  There were a number of bits I wanted to bolt on and planned modifications that I had in mind but first I HAD to drive it!  After a couple of outings, and the obligatory teething problems everything settled down and the truck was working well.  Then I went to the Minstead site!  After spending the morning exploring the site and attempting some of the very sticky bits Kelly and the girls arrived so I returned to the car park to pick them up.  I loaded everyone up and we set off for a quiet tour of the site.

After a while I became restless so we looked for some more challenging obstacles.  I managed to get some screams out of the girls over some climbs and descents and then I found a great challenge.  It was a drop down a slope into a stream (river) with a log bridge at the bottom and then a climb out the other side.  The descent was simply a case of lining up on the bridge at the bottom and then letting gravity and engine braking ‘duke it out’.  I drove across the bridge and then floored the throttle to climb up the slope on the other side.  I am not sure if I lost traction or if I backed off at the wrong moment but the next moment we were sliding sideways.  The slide stopped with us balanced on three wheels on the brink of rolling and then settled back onto all four (albeit still leant over at an uncomfortable angle!).  All the bystanders charged up and down the hill to balance the truck out.  The screams were now very off putting so Kelly and the girls got out.  With the Landie stable I tried to restart it but for some reason it would not crank over.

No-one could get around to pull me forwards or backwards so I was stuck for a while.  Fortunately a member of the Isle of Wight club (who were guests at the event) with a Camel Landy was able to get to the top of the hill and winched me to the top.  This was quite a lengthy process and remodelled my front bumper into a very nice ‘V’ shape!  This reinforced the reason for putting a large, thick spreader plate behind every recovery point, if I had not done this then the bolts holding on my front recovery point would have pulled through the bumper, even though the bumper is made of 5mm thick steel. 

Once I was at the top of the hill I tried to work out why the engine would not crank over.  After much head scratching and threatening to solve the problem permanently with a rag in the fuel tank and a match (I was rather annoyed!).  I checked the gearbox linkage and found that the retaining clip had come out so it was holding the gearbox between Park and Reverse.  A quick fix with some zippy ties (Landie repair kit number two, a close second to the first place Duck tape!) and I was mobile again!  My plan to have another go was given short shrift by Rich and the others so I returned with him to the Car Park.  All this drama resulted in an ultimatum from Kel that I put the roll cage (that had been sat in the garage for two years) on the truck before the girls and her got in it again!

As you can imagine, free licence to break out the grinder and welder again was not an opportunity to pass up!  The roll cage I had bought was one of Tomcat Motorsport’s full external cages.  The cage is made out of 2 inch diameter CDS steal with a 3mm wall thickness.  The cage came as three bent hoops, one that follows the shape of the front screen and sits on the bulkhead outriggers, one that fitted just behind the doors and picked up on the front tub chassis outriggers and the final one at the very rear of the truck that sits onto the rear cross-member.  There were also a number of straight lengths that needed to be welded into the cage to join it all together. 

There was much head scratching on how to fit the cage.  My first thought was to cut the hoops where they pass through the swage line of the bodywork and weld in shaped metal plates that could be bolted together in the same way as the Safety Devices cage.  In the end I decided (with a little help from my friends) that cutting holes straight through the bodywork to pass the hoops through was a simpler and probably stronger solution than cutting and adding bolt plates.  The other problem was how to cut the ‘fish-mouths’ into the straight tubes so that they wrapped around the hoops to make it as strong as possible when welded together.  The solution to this was to use a 2 1/8” hole cutter and holding the tube securely in a saw horse.

To fit the cage Rich cut the holes in the body (his hands shook less than mine) for the hoops to pass through and we put the hoops into place.  I then did some careful measuring and cut the various straight lengths of tube to length.  Next was to weld these tubes into place to make up the cage.  As I could only reach the outside of tubes to weld I asked Jeremy and Mark to help me lift the cage out of the body so I could weld all of the internal joints as well.  After much welding and getting creative to produce mounts for the obligatory wall of spot lights the cage was ready for paint.  I used a paint recommended by Rich from his experience of it when painting his banger racers.  It is called one-pack polyurethane and the beauty of it is that even after big impacts on the track the paint remains stuck to the bangers.  I wanted to paint the cage rather than power-coat or plastic coat it as I know it will take some abuse and as it is painted it will be simple to sand back all the scratches and re-paint it.

After a couple of coats of paint it was time to put the cage back in the vehicle.  To do this I grabbed as many bodies as I could to lift the cage into position and then persuade it (i.e. jump up and down on it!) to slide down through the body until it sat on the chassis.  At the same time as fitting the cage I also wanted to fit rock sliders to the sides of the truck to add protection and also provide a place from which I could jack up the vehicle.  To do this I cut two lengths of heavy gauge 3inch box section and shaped them to fit between the wheel arches.  I fabricated mounts for both the cage and the sills from lengths of thick angle iron which I welded to the chassis and the cage.  The sills were not welded to the mounts, I made these so that they bolted to the cage mounts.  This is for if (when!) I damage them I can unbolt them and replace them.

Once everything was zapped into place I made up some cover plates from thin aluminium sheet to tidy up the holes where the cage goes through the bodywork and gave the whole thing another lick of paint.  Last job was to fit the reversing lights to the rear of the cage and the bank of spotlights to the front.  These were wired thorough relays the gearbox switch and the main beam respectively.

This was not an easy, simple or quick job but I am glad it is done.  Land Rovers with their aluminium bodies do not afford a huge amount of protection if you park them oily side up.  While I know that a serious ‘off’ at speed is still not going to be very clever at least I now have a fighting chance.  At low speed the cage will provide protection to the occupants and stop the body folding.  One added advantage of the cage I have discovered in a subsequent visit to Minstead.  I squeezed through a gap between two trees and hit a root.  This threw the body against the opposite tree and would have caused panel damage in a standard vehicle.  In mine, the cage just bounced off the tree!