Rock Climbing

Well I managed to get to the indoor wall at Easter and this was my first visit for about 15 months judging by the expiry date of my membership at the Edge in Sheffield , climbing last year was very sporadic and very few outing were made infact I think I only climbed 3 times outdoors in the whole of 2005

A plan was hatched to take a trip to Stanage on the may day bank holiday weekend Saturday with the kids , it must of been 18 months since I climbed at Stange and we duly arrived early in the afternoon and set out for the High Neb area

We chose some low grade routes as My sons G/F was a beginner and so it made sense to look for a couple of easy routes such as Diffs and V Diffs etc , a simple Diff route was chosen for starters and I have to admit it was much harder than I thought it would be

It only goes to show just how out of shape you can get from a lay off , 2 years before that I started my season climbing VS's but I suppose I was also climbing throughout the winter at the indoor wall

We all climbed another Diff and 2 nice V Diffs that were hard but well protected , next stop will have to be Birchen Edge to reclimb some of the climbs I know so well to build up the old confidence and to push back up to the VS levels

Oh and I forgot to mentions I am carrying about 20lbs more weight and this sure doesn't help in the sport of rock climbing, so i will have to work on loosing that by running but that a whole new blog post

Lightweight Land Rover Chassis Replacement

Been a while since I posted to my blog due to the amount of time I have been spending on hands on projects rather than sitting in front of the PC for a change

As in my last post I have been working on the range rover chassis that we purchased on eBay some time ago , originally it was cleaned up with small angle grinders and flap discs to remove all rust and to treat any dubious rust patches with rust treat ment and then it was painted in Bonda Rust primer 2 coats

Whilst working on this chassis for our new hybrid V8 powered lightweight land rover I noticed that the previous owners welding repairs were looking to say the least not very pretty and in most areas the repairs appeared to be very poor and so I took the view that I would remove some sections to check the structural integerty of the chassis repairs

As anyone will tell you repairing some one else's previous repairs is more time consuming that don't the original repair and this was the case , the area where the chassis had been shortened for use of the land rover where very poorly done and no closure plates were welded over the join to spread any load

All plates were removed and surrounding areas cleaned up the join was then actually welded and then ground down with large plates welded over the joins overlapping the join by several inches in 3mm steel plate as you can see fro the pictures the welding is now very strong the last thing we need is for the hybrid chassis to come apart on the join

More details on the light weight landrover chassis repairs are on the main area of the website

Next is the rear tub repairs