BX Towing Weight?

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DavidRutherford
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Post by DavidRutherford »

Marty wrote:Just remember when tanking along at 80 mph with a knackered TZD on a flatbed behind you when you apply the brakes the trailer will push you forwards. I didnt and had occasion to change my pants.....
A very good reason to make sure the brakes on a trailer work properly. Not just a bit, but come on good and proper. A friends flatbed trailer has the best brakes I know of on a trailer, and the car/trailer assembly comes to a halt just about as fast as a car can on it's own, even when laden.
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Post by Stinkwheel »

Just remember when tanking along at 80 mph with a knackered TZD on a flatbed behind you when you apply the brakes the trailer will push you forwards. I didnt and had occasion to change my pants.....

Yep done that too, GSA on trailer, trailer brakes went out to lunch at pretty much start of the journey.

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Post by Dollywobbler »

I remember speaking to a bloke who owned an old Land Rover. A great tow car but they didn't have enough brakes to stop themselves, let alone anything they were towing!

Anyway, was chatting to this bloke and he said he was towing a Land Rover with his old Land Rover, was going down a hill and despite the fact that he was standing on the brake pedal, it wouldn't slow down!

Now that sounds scary!

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Post by cavmad »

I still remember the undercracker filling moment I collected a Cortina 2.3 for a friend on a flatbed. Came off a bypass round a very sharp bend (with a 20 limit) onto another bypass whilst overtaking a bloke towing a caravan. I, not being used to towing and not arsed about speed limits, was doing about 35-40mph and the trailer decided to start snaking . How I didn`t hit the caravan I`ll never know and the fella pulling the carvan`s face was a picture :D
I never really learnt my lesson about towing/carrying weight either because I had another near death experience in a 7.5 tonner with two IBC`s of chemiclas on the back doing about 70mph when I had to brake suddenly. That was fun I can tell you.
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Post by DavidRutherford »

yangreen wrote:I remember speaking to a bloke who owned an old Land Rover. A great tow car but they didn't have enough brakes to stop themselves, let alone anything they were towing!

Anyway, was chatting to this bloke and he said he was towing a Land Rover with his old Land Rover, was going down a hill and despite the fact that he was standing on the brake pedal, it wouldn't slow down!

Now that sounds scary!

Ian
Are you sure that wasn't me? I've had that happen to me, and recounted the tale on here in the past (maybe more than a year ago)

It was a SWB landrover towing a flatbed with a LWB landrover on it, going down a hill in Swansea. I was going very slowly anyway (abotu 15-20mph) but it wouldn't slow down lower than about 10MPH... luckily the traffic lights went green at the right moment, the hill ended, and it all managed to stop. I stood on the brake pedal so hard my leg was aching for days afterwards.

Although we did subsequenty find that the SWB landrover had an amount of oil in it's rear brakes due to failed axle seals.... I hasten to add this was NOT my vehicle (in fact, neither of them were.)
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Post by Dollywobbler »

My information is based on a chat in a pub in the Midlands area so probably not you David!

Those Landies were terrifying for their (lack of) brakes. When they put the V8 in, they de-tuned it to a mere 94bhp from the standard 144. Still sounds like a bad idea to me.

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Post by DavidRutherford »

Evendently we've (he and I) both had the same brown-trouser moment then!

The problem with Landrover brakes is that the early ones just weren't big enough. The drums on the back of my 405 are about the same size as the FRONT brakes on a 1960's landrover SWB. eek!
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Post by jeremy »

The other problem with landRover brakes is that few people bother to adjust them properly. They actually work much better with the things adjusted tight with minimal pedal movement but like most systems the mechanical advantage provided by the pedal decreases rapidly when they get slack.

I will admit that for heavy towing they are woefully inadequate and I've never been able to understand why they were'n changed to discs especially as the same axles were fited with discs for the Range Rover - but then they kept that strange and grossly inneficient 6 cylinder 'F' head engine going till 1980 or so, about 15 years after they'd chucked it out of the cars in 3 litre form.

Santana (Spanish assemblers of land Rovers) had been making 6 cylinder versions of the land Rover petrol engine for years by then - so if they didn't want to use the V8 they could have used that one.

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Post by Dollywobbler »

Drifting HUGELY off topic, Santana are still going and still make their Land Rover with leaf springs! Returned last year to the UK market I think.

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Post by Stewart (oily!) »

Scary towing moment, the worst one was when myself and two mates were attempting to move a Wharram catamaran (fairly heavy ply construction 22` long) using a rather undersized car transporter trailer and that paragon of heavy towing vehicles, A RENAULT 5 ! we separated the hulls, dragged them onto the woefully short trailer, moved stuff like anchors etc into the boot of athe car, lashed the whole thing down and set off, the first problem was nose weight! or the reverse actually, undulations in the road were lifting the back wheels off the road! STOP! reload the gear in the boat, two rear seat passengers, better, then the speedo hit 35mph and the snaking began, talk about Assume crash positions, we came to rest on our own side of the road and set about re-distributing the load as best we could, not easy when you have an overhang like we had, the remainder of the journey was completed at thirty miles an hour, we all survived but looking back it was one of the silliest ventures I have undertaken on the public highway.
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Post by DavidRutherford »

jeremy wrote: as the same axles were fited with discs for the Range Rover
Sorry... not so. The Series landrover leaf-sprung axle and the Range Rover Coil-sprung axle are radically different bits of kit. I did once look at fitting Rangie discs and 4-pot calipers to my (2.5 tonne!) FC landrover, but it's just not possible. I make do with 11" diamater x 3" wide twin-leading shoe drum brakes. (which are actually quite powerful)
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Post by DavidRutherford »

Stewart (oily!) wrote:undulations in the road were lifting the back wheels off the road!
Now there's a "POLICE CAMERA ACTION" moment if ever there was one!

and a renault 5? dear me! they have enough trouble moving themselves down the road.
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Post by jeremy »

David - I was suggesting that it would have been easy for Rover to have fitted discs albeit with some re-design of the axles. Even some form of self adjusting drums would have helped - after all they fitted them in 1948 and deleted about 1950.

Mind you when a company manages to produce 4 cylinder petrol and diesel at 2.25 litre, totally different 6 cylinder 2.5 and similar but rather different 3 litre overhead inlet and side exhaust petrol and 2 versions of a 2 litre sohc engine, again totally different you do begin to wonder what's going on (1966 Rover engine range). Much the same went for gearboxes and so they sat down and produced an entirely different but similar one for the Range Rover and 100? inch military vehicle and guess what - it had an even worse change. By this time they were part of BL and presumably had access to the very tough Jaguar box that would take the V12 engine!

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Post by DavidRutherford »

jeremy wrote:David - I was suggesting that it would have been easy for Rover to have fitted discs albeit with some re-design of the axles.
I see what you mean... sorry! But remember Land-Rover's motto "Evolution, not Revolution" I'm sure that year they changed the design of the gearchange lever ever-so slightly, and so that was it for the modifications for the next 3 years!

Self-adjusting brakes would have been very nice indeed, but I have a feeling that's not agricultural enough for Land-Rover. After all, it took them until 1968/9 to get synchromech on all forward gears!

My biggest grip with Rover at about that time is the fact that they killed off the development of the "Iceberg" diesel engine, based on the V8. That would have made a fantastic towing engine, and along with some other serious mods would have made the series 3 era of vehicles fantastic rather than just good. They were looking at about 120-130hp from a car-diesel-engine... In the late 70's. Ah well, another cock-up, brought to you by British Leyland!
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Post by jeremy »

There was a load of diesel research going on in the 70's and 80's that we don't know much about. I clearly recall seeing an advert for diesel engineers for Jaguar of all people but i suppose this could have been for a military engine rather than a car engine. This was probably 86 or so.

The self adjusting brakes were very simple really - just didn't have any retraction springs - and a strange rivet device in the shoe to spring it off the drum!


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