Philfree's L200 express 4x4 buggy

[philfree]

Hi
Thought i would put my buggy up to show it to you guys now please no one flame me for cutting up the l200 because it was quite rusty and not really worth putting back on the road.
I originally brought it as a complete ute off a farmer i did work for he had it was is uncles daily driven ute to get from the farm into town etc then as it wore out they put a new motor into it and then he used it for a bit then he brought a Navara and it became the harvester service ute witch gets overloaded and thrashed through the cane padocks by the workers anyway it eventualy give trouble with the carby and would take 25 seconds of winding to get it started so he gave up and brought another car for him and the navara became the harvester ute and the l200 sat in the shed for 6 or so years he tells me it was caked with dust when we pulled it out. i had plans to do it up but the rust was to bad had it in the doors the floor the chassis the quarter panels and the tray was nacked it was al a bit much and i wanted more towing power so i brought a patrol 4.2td ute witch is now my daily sorta. i did a deal with a boilermaker friend of mine who helped me cut all the extra stuff off and shortned the wheel base by about 1.2m then connected it all back up added the roll cage. That was the start just a shortened ute with a roll cage and no panels etc.

Then the mods came their wasn't enough power to keen up with their Gemini powered buggy so i found a rolled 4g54 pajero and swapped my 4g52 and narrow 4 speed 4wd box (witch i regret now because i am pretty sure i could of fitted a older evo motor then) and put the 4g54 and 5 speed box in on the weekend and then later down the track it blew the diff so i fitted the lsd out of the pajero and away we went again i originaly had the factory carby on the motor but it was to much effort keeping it going so went to the simpler weber off of the xf falcon and it went pretty good minimal mods to fit only an adapter plate and it was done but found that when i jumped the buggy it would muck up the carby (what a problem to have i know) and no one could really fix them so gave up and put a spare 1600cc gemini carby onto it which fits better then the original carby or the Weber but was certainly down on airflow but it was reliable and give no trouble.

That was all good for a while but power bug bit again so i got some extractors and got a short exhaust made of about a foot with a hot dog and that was better but not good enough and i got sick of the fuel floating around the carbys bowl when it was in mid air so decided to go with efi.

Efi i got a magna efi manifold and took it down to the local engineering shop along with a vp commodore v6 throttle body and elbow and got them to make an adapter plate on the opposite end of the manifold to suit the commodore elbow and that made it a direct bolt on for the commodore throttle body and parts he blanked the other end off. i brought a megasquirt 2v3.57 i think it is wired it all up using the factory commodore tps, idle motor and swaping the coolant sensor for the commodore one and wired it to the magna injectors brought a cheap laptop on ebay for 165 bucks and downloaded he software and got a 2l surge tank a facet lift pump and a bosh 044 fuel pump mounted all that on the back of the tray and got it running relatively easily i had a dud tps which caused some issues on getting it to run sweet but i got it going and left it like this for a while as it was quite good to drive.

Then the motor wore out turns out that the filter (pod filter) wasn't good enough at cleaning the air and dusted the motor so pulled the motor out and pulled it down rings were bugged and the valve seats and a couple of valves so after a fair while i got the block and head back from the machine shop and put it back together with new rings new bearings and a fully serviced head that had also been machined down a little so it would have 1 extra compression along with the extra from the .50 pistons that it already had i figure it should be around 9.8 ish to 1 and got it running pretty good with just a wide-band oxygen sensor in the exhaust had a bit of trouble with the distributor breaking down under load and low rpm witch when i tried to tune it made it excessivly rich down low because the sensor didn't see the unburnt fuel so said it was running lean but got all that sorted and have been driving it around a fair bit done some beach runs and bits and peaces the bracket for the exhaust broke and it basically broke off at the extractors so welded it back on but it broke again so i just left it i quite like the sound. Any way ill be putting some photos up pretty soon so let me know what you think.

[philfree]

Some pics some of these are old
http://s1124.photobucket.com/user/datso ... how/buggys
i own the grey one with doors out of these pics