Ushuaia or Bust: The Pan-Am 2K Expedition

[tmckeon88]

I am starting a thread to share my long trip in my 1969 IIA 88" along the Pan American highway system, which took place from June - December of 2000. We dubbed the trip "Ushuaia or Bust" as Ushuaia is the last town in Tierra del Fuego, the terminus of the Pan-Am route.

My wife and I thought up this idea in the late 90s as sort of an adventure to embark on, since we were both teachers and had some time to devote to the idea. I had been into Land Rovers for several years and she was a Spanish teacher s the skills seemed to fit. (We are no longer together, for unrelated reasons, but I will continue to refer to her as my wife as she was during the trip.)

The planning started with a rebuild of the truck, which I bought in 1994 from John Hawkins in Kenduskeag, ME. It already had a rebuilt 2.3 L gas engine and the 4-headlight modification and was in good running shape overall. It is registered as a '69 but from what I can gather from serial numbers it has the engine ansd drive train from a 1960; it may just have some later body panels. And of course after the rebuild it had a lot of new parts.

I am only a very amateur mechanic so my rebuild will seem sloppy to many member of this form who have real skills. The Rover is luckily very forgiving. So I hope you will be as well when you see some of my bodges. To my credit, the truck is still running and is my daily commuting car, so I must have gotten most of the nuts and bolts back on in the right places. I need to scan my prints of the rebuild into jpgs which I will try to do as soon as I can.

If people have questions or thoughts about what you would like to hear about or discuss in the thread, please let me know. I am new to starting a thread so I hope I don't make too many mistakes. We can talk about road conditions, availability of gas/food/lodging, costs, passport and travel carnet issues, vehicle shipping, Macchu Picchu, or whatever.

A few pictures to get us started:



1 & 2 Us before departing, with the truck loaded
3. Ferry crossing Lake Champlain. (We left from Wiscasset, ME on June 30, 2000, headed across to Burlington, VT, then across NY and into Canada, crossing above the Great Lakes. Our intent was to travel the AlCan highway to Alaska, get up as for north as we could on the Dalton Highway, then turn around and head down the west coast of the Americas in the system of highways called the Pan-American.)
4&5 Wildlife in Alaska and Canada.

Well, there's a start. I hope people find this interesting. I'll try to get a few rebuild photos in there as soon as I can and you can gawp at my silver haired father watching me take over and make a mess of his garage!

Cheers,
Tom

[JimCT]

I can not wait to see the rest of the trip, my wife and i have talked about doing just that trip, have her take a half year sabbatical. Share all the details! thanks, Jim

[Contractor]

Very cool, keep posting.

[Revtor]

Please post more, I'd love to read and see all about your journey!!

[tmckeon88]

Update #2

Some information about our rebuild of the Rover. I won't call it a restoration because we were in a bit of a hurry and could not observe all the niceties, but our intention was to get a galvanized frame, redo the brakes throughout, new clutch, some new wiring and troubleshoot whatever came up. We got involved in the RN restoration discount program which saved us considerable funds, and we bought just about everything through them. (They were also very helpful during the trip, calling to have parts shipped to Alaska and so forth as the need arose.)

Before:


We parked the truck in my dad's garage in June of 1999 and started dismantling. Most stuff comes apart fairly readily. I had done a new transmission and clutch before and numerous brake/hub seal jobs, so I felt like I could tackle it. We did resort to a Sawzall a few times to cut spring bolts and used lots of PB blaster and WD-40, as well as a 6 foot section of pipe that we nicknamed "The Torque Multiplier" or "Senor Torquemada." A few sticky bolts would give a loud squeal when they finally surrendered to Senor Torquemada.

More shots of the tear-down:


We put in new front springs. I had replaced the rears a couple of years before (in a crippling 14-hour session of trying to turn the shackle bolts) so I didn't think they needed to be changed, but it turned out with the additional load the Rover would be carrying, the rear end would settle down pretty far. We were dragging our tail a lot during that trip. Of course, we overpacked, but I can discuss the packing rationale later.

More tear down shots:



My little 2.25L engine has been a real trouper throughout the time I've had it. The previous owner had it rebuilt and the hardened valves for unleaded gas put in, but otherwise it's a 1960 7:1 compression engine with a Weber single barrel carb and an upgraded distributor, the later Lucas type. I've put over 100,000 miles on this engine just since I've owned it (and replaced the speedo in 1996) so it has a lot more than that under its belt. It still starts quickly and runs smoothly even to this day, and I've hardly done more than tune-ups and valve cover gasket replacements. If I could only keep the oil inside it instead of on the driveway!

We replaced the rear door (and last summer I replaced that door yet again - frame rust) and I fooled around over the following year with getting a custom-drilled piece of rear glass that I could mount a wiper motor in, but that glass cracked pretty soon and it just stayed cracked for years until a I gave up on that and put in plain glass and a wiper mounted in the upper frame, above the window. I loves me some clear windows. I also have fussed with rear-window defrosters and never had any luck getting them to work, so right now my rear glass is just plain and I am super cautious on cold rainy days when the windows fog.

The day the truck arrived with the galvanized frame was exciting. I was leery of how to move it but it turned out the truck driver, my dad and I managed to just carry it into the garage on set it against the wall. I should have done more to clear the bolt holes of zinc, but I only learned of that later. I did spray it all over with Ospho, a phosphoric acid solution that bonds with iron to create iron phosphate, an inert rust-resistant shell. Any dings in the galvanizing I hoped to fill with this to stave off corrosion.

We sold the old frame to a kid who actually drove down from Nova Scotia to collect it in a big pick up truck. The frame wasn't in bad shape; lots of oil all over it of course. The transmission cross member was banged up from some ancient off-roading incident before I owned it. He seemed happy to have it, so we got it all loaded up and tied and down and wished him well.

Next up: a few more reassembly notes and maybe some comments on planning to visit several countries and cross borders with an foreign vehicle.

[tmckeon88]

Update #3.

Some more notes about the rebuild:

We got the truck more or less back together. There were some mishaps, mostly due to my ignorance of electrical issues such as when I burned up several sets of points because the high tension lead from the coil bypassed the coil altogether, so the full battery current was running through the points on the distributor. But once I sorted that out, it actually started up fairly easily after 6 weeks of being torn to pieces.

At that point though, I realized that I hadn't wired the instruments and lights back together properly so I ended up having it towed to a local garage and a mechanic put in a bunch of new wiring and got it more or less running. This took a few weeks; we returned home and I had to go get the truck a few weeks later. This was all the year before the trip so I had anticipated having a long shakedown period.



We repainted the truck (just with a brush) in Rover Bronze Green with Limestone wheels and top. The brush painting is a bit ghetto, but since I don't have too many vanities the appearance of the truck, it worked out fine. (I've brush painted it several times since then.) The previous color was something called "Cameroon Green" which had more of a bluish cast to it, so once we started repainting one part, we had to do the whole thing.

The bulkhead was a bit of a Frankenstein job, which at the time I did out of expediency. I didn't realize until later that bulkheads were hard to come by and tricky to keep in good shape (I'm thinking of the great bulkhead rebuilds you see here sometimes on the forums) so I'm sort of stuck with what I have. I had some pieces of 1/8" aluminum cut and bent to match the two kick panels (which were rusted) and I bolted those in, and also put in the galvanized panels that were there, so I have nice thick kick panels but the overall geometry of the bulkhead isn't quite true anymore. If I do in all again, I'll take some time and trouble to get it restored more properly.

We had some trouble getting the doors to line up and so forth, (they're still not perfect) so there was a lot of fussing and fitting. I eventually managed to get it all bolted back together and over the course of the next months, I more or less got it all working again. We had a oldish Fairey overdrive, freewheeling hubs and 16" wheels, and someone gave us a full set of BF Goodrich All-Terrain ATs (more about those later).

It sill has oil leaks, and the rear axle casing is slowly disintegrating, but at this point we had most of the mechanicals in order. All new brake lines, one new hub, new front springs, some new wheel cylinders, galvanized frame, etc. Most of what we fixed has stayed fixed. It's now twelve years on, so some things, like the brake lines, are in need of replacement again. There were also some odd things, like the new canvas axle stops, which looked great when they went on, but caused unusual problems later on.

So- next post, I'll mention a few things about the stuff we packed, and about preparations such as contacting the State Department for information on traveling through Colombia (their response: don't do it).

Cheers- off to see if the Patriots can secure a place at the Superbowl.

[siii8873]

We got involved in the RN restoration discount program which saved us considerable funds

What is this?? I've restored a few vehicles and never heard mention of this program???

[Revtor]

Thanks for the posts Tom, it's a great read!

[ThePhotographer]

We got involved in the RN restoration discount program which saved us considerable funds

What is this?? I've restored a few vehicles and never heard mention of this program???

This is a program we had long ago for frame up restoration customers. Unfortunately it was an accounting nightmare and it became too difficult to continue.

[tmckeon88]

Whoops, guess I made a bit of a faux pas there. The restoration discount gave something like 20% off purchases following a frame purchase for a certain number of months or whatever. Too bad it's discontinued, but on the other hand in those days there were very few Proline parts available. Nowadays prices seem easier to afford on many items.

Another update later today-