Reynolds Boughton did not care about driver comfort. The engine mounts are incredibly stiff and transmit a lot of engine vibration to the cab, making it noisy and uncomfortable. After a bit of hunting though engine mount catalogues I settled on Range Rover/ Land Rover Discovery 200 TDI engine mounts. The 200TDI engine is quite a bit lighter than the Perkings engine in the RB. However on the 200TDI two mounts take the whole weight of the engine and some of the gearbox weight. On the RB the weight of the engine and gearbox is spread fairly evenly across 4 mounts so it should work out about right. On the left is an RB mount. On the right is the 200TDI mount.

The front engine mounts were pretty easy to make.

The gearbox cradle was a bit more tricky and involved quite a bit of cutting and modification to fit the new mounts. In the background of the first picture is the Dodge 50 cradle with it's heavy duty mounts.
After temporarily refitting the cab I started the engine, just as a test. The cab vibration seemed much reduced. The cab is currently completely stripped with no doors or interior so I won't really know until it is all back together. Hopefully I will now be able to see out of the door mirrors. Previously they shook so much you couldn't see out of them.

The battery was originally installed in a compartment in the pickup body. The pickup body will be removed when I fit a habitation box so the battery had to be relocated to under the cab on the passenger side. It's a bit awkward installing the battery but there is just enough room.

I intend to fit winches front and rear. The original bumper was pretty bent and rusty. It would need a lot of modification to fit a winch without having it sticking even further out the front. I've never liked the looks of that big square girder on the front so I decided to make my own. After a week of measuring, re-measuring and modelling in CAD I came up with this. I tried to keep some of the RB look just more curvy.

Cutting the parts out on my plasma cutter

Much time was spent spent carefully clamping, welding and bending. My careful CAD work paid off. I'd expected to be fighting distortion due to the number of separate plates in this bumper but after initial welding up the top came out dead flat.

I couldn't resist test fitting it before finish welding. This bumper is about 20mm taller overall than the original, which makes the middle look a bit chunky but there's mot much I can do about that. I need the extra room for the winch.

As this will be an overlanding truck I need a lot more electricity then the original alternator can provide. The plan is to fit two alternators, one 12V 150A unit for the truck electrics and one 100A 24V unit that will be adapted to output 48V for the house batteries. There is no way the original belt could handle this amount of power so I need to convert to 8PK poly V belt.
I bent a piece of flat bar into a hoop then welded it and machined it round. After shrink fitting the hoop onto the original pulley I machined the poly V grooves in it.

Testing the alternator positioning. It's going to be a tight fit.

This is a bit of a problem. The chassis has very little torsional strength without the rear tub fitted. Here there is about 30 degrees of twist in the chassis. That's going to break things if I cross axle the beast. Most of the chassis cross members are variations on C channel which has very little torsional strength. I'm hoping that boxing in or replacing the cross members will help stiffen the chassis up a bit.

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