Leaderboard

6 months later now, and we have finally made some notable progress on the Landmaster. I might not fit all of our progress into this update, we shall see because there is quite a lot to cover. Paul kindly lent us his Landmaster so that we could see what had been modified on ours in the past, which has proven very useful and has uncovered things that we wouldn't have spotted without a similar machine next to ours. The first thing that we noticed was that our front axle was upside down. There is an arch shape in the centre of the axle on one side, which should point upwards. Previously our front axle had been scraping the grille when the axle pivoted, however with the axle flipped over it now has much more space to pivot. You can see the scrape marks in the picture below, and the amount of space gained from flipping the axle over Something else we noticed was that our machine appeared to have its clutch set up wrong. It was set up such that when the clutch pedal is pushed down, an idler pulley is moved away from the drive belt, removing tension from the drive belt and allowing it to slip on the engine pulley. However, from comparing to Pauls machine, we know that the clutch should be set up as a 'push to drive' pedal, where the belt sits on the other side of the idler pulley and when the pedal is pressed down, it tensions the drive belt and drive is provided the gearbox. We have now made this change, which required a slightly longer belt, so it is now up to an A45 belt. Another modification on our machine is that it doesn't have the cast engine pulley that it would have had from the factory. That has been replaced by a pair of taper lock pulleys, which are larger than the original pulley. The deck pulley is only 1/8" larger in diameter, whereas the drive pulley is 1" larger in diameter. This is not too much of a problem, as the pulleys seem to work with the size of belts that we have now We took off the rear fender to get better access to the brake band and the gearbox to make some adjustments. The gear selectors felt stiff, and it was difficult to tell when a gear had been engaged. All it took to sort this was a bit of oil in the 2 oiling points, and both selectors moved smoothly, with a clear difference between each position on the selector. The brake band just needed tightening a bit, and now functions as it should do. Finally for this update, we tackled the handlebars, which had been cut and rewelded at a different angle by a previous owner. Having removed the handlebars, we cut around one of the welds and managed to separate the handlebars into 2 parts We cleaned up the welding on the T-junction, which was pretty messy and rewelded the handlebars in the same position as Pauls Landmaster. Quite a while was spent with the angle grinder making the joins as smooth as possible, and we sprayed it with some zinc galvanising paint. Ignore the pile of Kohlers waiting to be put to use in the background We have made even further progress, but that'll have to wait for another day as my wake up time for sixth form starts with a 5. Joseph