One of the most common complaints about the traditional Land Rover body style is the level of noise and vibration that the occupants are subjected to every time they get inside.  Excessive noise just makes the drive that much more tiring and in some cases such as the van bodies where there are no rear headliners or interior installed the noise is so bad that there really isn’t even a point turning on the radio at all.

At this point the bulkhead is back from the paint shop and was one of the very first parts to be painted and as with all of the galvanized and aluminum parts it was epoxy primed and finished with a high-quality base/clear 2-step system.

The first layer of material designed to reduce noise transmission is a butyl rubber backed aluminum mat that is very, very sticky and grips tightly everywhere it is applied.  One positive side effect of this is to provide a 100% effective moisture barrier to the surface of the metal to which it is applied.  When dismantling the 110 in the first place we noted that the only places where there was zero corrosion were those covered with stickers of some type as these completely blocked oxygen from reaching the lower layers.

Once the foot boxes were covered we removed the bulkhead again and applied a layer of VB2 a mass-loaded vinyl intended to reduce vibration even further to both sides of the bulkhead. VB2 does not stick as well as the butyl sheet and you need to use a heat-gun to make it pliable enough to form around the various shapes but it does retain its shape fairly well.  One concern is that it could separate from the layer below and we suspect that in some places it has and this is why doing the first layer with the butyl mat was important.

The silver foil is a heat reflective matting from Thermotec, it also doesn’t seem to stick as well as we’d like and in the future we expect to add a handful of rivets from the inside using backing plates on the outside to ensure that everything stays in place long-term.  The original intention for the butyl mat was as a weather barrier you could drive screws through and still maintain it’s waterproof integrity so using the aluminum rivets should not be a problem.

The same treatment minus the heat-shield was done on the inside surface as well. Then all of the visible painted surfaces were masked off (as well as the heat-shielding) and the rest was sprayed with polyester truck bedliner to provide a good durable surface.  For the most part this worked, however one thing to note is that bedliner cures to a very hard surface and will crack as the VB2 shrinks which it seems to do a little with time. The solution was to apply a thin bead of seam sealer around the edges after things had cured for a while, seam sealer is a very similar material (polyurethane) and blends in almost perfectly.  Most if not all of the areas with bedliner will eventually be covered over with other materials but until then we wanted to have a good durable surface.

The next area to get attention is the cover that goes over the bellhousing, this is quite a heavy steel part and we did more or less the same treatment here but even heavier to try to reduce the clutch noises.  It was entirely covered with the heat-shielding material on this bottom side to try to keep more of the heat under the vehicle and not roasting our legs.

The transmission tunnel cover got similar treatment, but once the sound-absorbing foam was applied we realized that it was never going to stick long-term and we applied another layer of VB2 over top of the foam and then used rivets and backing plates to secure everything in place before re-spraying the entire assembly with bedliner.  This would later turn out to be one of the more difficult pieces to re-fit to the vehicle since all the applied materials changed how things fit together quite significantly. However time and patience and the judicial use of a knife and things were made to fit together.  A good tight fit is critical to getting noise reduction as it only takes one small gap to allow a great deal of noise through.

The next item to get attention was the seatbox.  The battery box and toolbox had both been previously removed, sandblasted and re-galvanized and then sprayed with VB-1X followed by a brush on application of bedliner before being riveted back into place.  Then both surfaces were covered with butyl matting to both fully waterproof everything and add noise damping.  Just to try something different we then coated the bottom with a latex based viscoelastic polymer intended for waterproofing the roof of RVs to see how it would work, once cured a layer of bedliner was applied by brush before mounting the entire assembly onto the chassis.

It was then time to take a good break.

Only a short posting today as we got the 200TDI bolted up to the engine mounts and the new clutch fitted today and managed to get the R380 to mate up perfectly without too much difficulty.  The LT230 transfer case still needs to be bolted into position (and as learned later on in the process, some of those bolts go into the oil-filled area of the transfer case and you probably want to fit them using “The Right Stuff” gasket-maker to help keep the oil inside the case where it belongs.

In the second photo you can also see how the steering box has moved from the right-hand side to the left-hand side as part of the conversion from RHD to LHD.  There were also a number of other small modifications required to the bulkhead and a new bracket from the chassis to the top-end of the panhard bar but overall it has been a pretty easy conversion so far.