Lifting roof on a Land Rover 110 Hard Top

[jocklandjohn]

Thought some of you might be interested in my home-made lifting roof project.

I've no particular RTW trip in mind - the van gets used for working out of on locations, and I have been in various pretty rough (and slightly exotic) places already with the 110 in my 15 years of ownership, but will be going to the north of Norway at some point soon, and then down to Morocco as well (been there before a couple of times) so decided now that I have a small boy that it needed to be made a bit more spacious and comfortable for three of us, and be able to contend with cold & snow and also hot climates too.

Rationale: pitching tents gets to be a pain. I've done plenty of it in several decades of travel, want to be freed of that chore with wet tents and setups in the dark or chucking it down rain or snow.

Roof tents are top-heavy and very expensive, and you're outside, which is nice when its nice, but not so nice when it's sub-zero and a howling gale.

So, a lifting roof seemed ideal.

Problem: expensive. Very expensive. As of writing this, about £6k to £10k depending on your wallet. Too much for me. And more than my 25 year old Land Rover cost me.

I gave it some thought and realized that for the DIY approach there are two 'construction' hurdles to overcome and one practical hurdle to consider:

construction on the drive at home with limited fabrication space & equipment means that the curve upwards at the back door, and the curve over the windscreen will require specialist skills to properly fabricate the shaped metal needed to accommodate the curves. And the practical problem is that removing the old roof to install the lifting mechanism will mean having the vehicle off the road for some time, which is a problem for me. And you need the means to easily lift it too, which I dont have.

Gave it some more thought and then realized I should just leave the existing roof intact, and build up out of the existing gutter line. Then bolt the 'new' roof to the curve of the old roof at the sides, and bolt through the alloy front and back, and fabricate a lifting mechanism above that on clean straight lines - ie not having to worry about curves at back door and windscreen.

I did a wander around the web and eventually found two easily available alloy extrusions that would allow the roof to work - one a Z section that gives a water-resistent upstand, to use for the lower section, and the other a long L section to use as the lifting bit. Crucially the combination of these two sections together leaves enough space to allow the fabric to pull inside when closed.










So then it was a trip to the city to buy the alloy sheets, get the local alloy fabricators to slice it to my cutting list, and do a DIY fit into the gutter.



Templates for front and back to get the correct shapes.






When cut it was all fitted to ensure it would work then lifted off and the local welder simply seam welded the corners for me. I got the welder to use their sheet bender to bend the front piece as this is fitted at an angle to follow the line of the windscreen for aerodynamics (on a shed!). At this stage it was light enough to allow me to lift it on and off on my own so I could still use the van.







Then the top section was formed, tacked and fitted - not without problems though - alloy is easily buckled by too much heat and it did go out of alignment and I had to rectify that.












At this point in early November things went pear-shaped. The unexpected I expected to have to deal with but this was not expected. My partner 'died' on the street. She's a fit 40 year old and suffered a cardiac arrest at work outside, collapsing on the road.

Luckily a colleague was able to do CPR until the local fire brigade crew who work nearby arrived in a few minutes to help, then two passing policemen from the nearby station got involved, and finally the paramedics arrived with a defib unit, which didn't work, so they did it again, and it could not restart her heart, so they tried a third time, but again not really doing the job.

So they had to get physical and manually kept her 'alive' as best as they could - problem now was they were so full-on in the back of the ambulance they could not actually drive it so one of the fire crew, a woman officer, jumped in and drove to the hospital.

It was a grim week, she was kept in an induced coma on life support, chilled to prevent brain swelling, but there were signs of some brain damage and I was asked to bring in our five year old boy, just in case.

Anyway she recovered amazingly well, walked out a few weeks later, and went back to work in January and has had a ICD fitted in her chest in case it happens again (they could not find any cause, no heart attack, no blood clots, her heart just stopped).

But to stay sane through all this I carried on as best as I could with my build.





Subframe assembly is from 19mm box section, that was welded in, leaving space for a roof hatch - campervan ones are flimsy and expensive, so I used a yacht deck hatch, which is immensely strong and relatively inexpensive, then attached the top sheet of 1.3mm alloy which was glued and riveted down.