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Dakar Rebuild - part 12

First drive

11/07/06

Taxed the Dakar this morning and dropped it on the car this afternoon. I then spent the entire evening (and what a glorious evening it was too!) driving around various bits of Derbyshire and Staffordshire, heading from Burton to Barton under Needwood, then to Sudbury, Doveridge, Rocester, Ashbourne, Fritchley, Ripley, Derby and back to Burton again, all in all about 100 miles.

TV cable

The first thing that had to be sorted was the gearbox line pressure cable - there's a lot of latitude in the adjustment for this and, to be safe, I'd gone towards the 'harder, later' end of the cable: first-to-second was bearable, but second-to-third occured at around 3700RPM on moderate throttle and nearly broke your neck! Third-to-fourth was a similar story, but it basically skipped 'slippy' fourth, instead going straight to lock-up fourth from third, again at approaching 4000RPM.

I had to back the cable off by about 10mm to get the shift pattern so that it didn't hold second for stupid amounts of time: Now all the shifts are firm but not overly so and on light throttle the 1-2-3-4 sequence is complete by around 40MPH with the engine hovering around 2000RPM. Kickdown is still atainable at WOT (the 'click' on the cable happens on the last 10mm or so of pedal travel) and drops a gear as expected. Brisk progress can now be made without the engine revving its nads off, and there's no clutch slip I can detect :-)

Brakes

Not a niggle, but a vast improvement over the previous incarnation of this car! I put most of this down to the Range Rover drivetrain and its viscous centre differential.

Previously, the Dakar had a Discovery transfer box which had the traditional manually-lockable centre diff. Obviously when driving on the road, this would be left unlocked to prevent transmission wind-up, however it also allowed individual wheels to lock under heavy breaking, notably the rears as the little weight that was over them to start with would be pitched forward during the braking operation

Now, with a viscous coupling to the front prop, when you stamp on the anchors the breaking force is distributed fairly evenly along the driveshafts, not only side to side through the axle but also front to back between axles as the coupling fights to keep the front and rear props rotating at a similar speed.

This means that if the rear prop speed begins to drop below the front prop speed as the rear wheels start to lock up, drive is transmitted through the coupling to the rear axle, keeping the wheels turning. The result? A much more measured, controlable braking experience!

Front diff grumble

Under drive the front diff appears to chatter away to itself while vibrating under braking. I'm not sure if this is prop- or UJ-related or if I've stuffed the front diff: I'll let it do another few hundred miles and change the oil again and see how much shrapnel (if any) leaves the housing with the oil :-)

Other than the above, a successful first run! Let's hope it stays that way :-)

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This page was last updated: 11^th July 2006 at 11:29pm UTC