Land Rover 101 Power Steering - Part 1

 Well, one thing I noticed straight away with the 101 is how heavy the steering is, parking is a nightmare and every time I go out with the car, I've got to park it back into a really thigh place, so power steering is a real must !

with the experience of my previous conversion on a LR series 3, a electric pump is out question, so a mechanical as to be fitted.

I knew that the old, 2 door Range Rover from the 70s had power steering, so the search began for the power steering pump from one of those cars + the bracket for it , and the crackshaft pulley for the same engine.

this picture I found online, showed what I was looking for :

you can see the pump on the right of the picture, close to the water pump. On the 101 the alternator is in the place of the air con compressor of this picture.

First job, turn the distributor 180º , since the vacuum advance is the oposite way from the one on the picture above : before :

after :

I must confess I was worried to do it, but it went fine, carefully I marked the plug leads, marked carefully what cylinder was getting the spark ( it was nº1 ) so when I refited the distributor back I connected that cylinder lead to the new position, from there on I just followed the ignition order.

the pump itself was a straight forward affair.

The bracket for the pump :

In place :

 with the pump :

next step , modify the crankshaft pulley tho accept a second pulley.

New adition to the Land Rover family

 Time flies, that's an old saying and quite a true one ! this blog has been abandoned for one year, how bad is that ? Anyway got something new, that made me desire to write here again !

For a long time I've been a fan of the Land Rover 101 forward control, the car was made like the Land Rover should had made all the others, in one word, STRONG !

Axles , specially the diffs, robust gearbox and transfer, and the engine, reliably and relatively powerful, unfortunately very thirsty too, but has far I can see it's the only downside.

So when this one showed up for sale I had to buy it and here it is :

Here at my front door, with my soon at the wheel, he's a big fan of the car, which he call "grandalhão", portuguese word to define something big !