Recently on Land Rover Addict there was a post from one of the members wanting to send his regards — and a thump — to the man who designed the fuel gauge sender on a Defender 110 tdi. Well, I'd like to send the same regards to the man who designed the pedal assemblies for the Rangies and Discoveries. I'm installing the 200tdi and 5 speed into what was a 1988 NAS V8 auto model left hand drive truck. However, what was generously supplied with the parts I purchased from the UK was a RHD pedal assembly from a 1994-6 Discovery 5 speed. From looking at it on the bench, both pedal assemblies look to be the same shape and you would say, this should work just fine... Well the first adjustment wasn't a surprise, the pedals were over to the left about 2.5" further than they should be due to the RHD seating position. I expected this and it was duly dealt with by heating the pedal arms to cherry red, and bending them to the right, then allowing them to cool and putting another bend in the arms closer to the pedals themselves. This worked quite successfully and should stand up well now that I've repainted the arms. Can't hardly tell if you didn't know it wasn't stock.
The second hurdle is the throttle cable, which on the rhd diesel only has a short distance to go. On the left hadn drive, I need about 188 more inches. This was fixed by a surplus cable from Princess Auto and 2 large fender washers assembled on the cable end to sandwich the pedal assembly frame and hold it in place. I had to cut a slice into the fender washers the width of the cable to allow it to slip over the cable and stay in place. Hard to describe in words, but a fairly simple fabrication.
Thirdly, there are two thin metal support brackets that exists on the Range Rover but not on the Discovery. Perhaps the Discovery gets its support in another way. One of these one the Range Rover, however, is directly in the way of the pivot arm that the clutch and brake pedal attach to. I tried 3 different ways to mount it while retaining the support bracket, however the bracket is now gone. Before its removal by sawzall, I put some weight into wiggling dashboard components and found that none of the wiggling I did moved the support bracket, so I concluded that it may not be necessary to the structural soundness.
Finally, offering up the new pedal assembly to the hole on the firewall, I was pleased to see that at least 2 of the 8 attaching bolts actually shared the same holes. The other 6 were off anywhere from 1/8" to 3/4" and as a result I had to do some creative trimming, drilling and utilize more fender washers to get a good solid — and good looking — fit.
This is as close to a bodge as I've had to do on this project, but all in all it worked out well. I've now started a photo album of the install which can be found here.
