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Due to Rover’s financial problems of the
time, the body had to be produced using an absolute minimum of new
tooling, and so it was decided to produce the body panels from aluminum
alloy, thereby requiring no press tools. In fact, the production of
body panels was made all the more easier by their actual design,
with only the bonnet and front wings having any real “shape”.
The part of the Land Rover that caused the
most problems from a cost point of view was that chassis. If money
had not been in such short supply at the time, the chassis frame
would have been constructed from deep-drawn steel channel section,
carefully shaped where required and built on a proper jig. To save
expense, each chassis box section was actually made from four long
strips of sheet steel with the edges all welded together in long
seams. Despite this somewhat haphazard way of producing a box
section (something with which Rover had little experience anyway),
the idea worked, producing a box section of great strength that was
capable of withstanding some pretty torturous treatment. |
