I have finally fitted a LT230 to my 92 Rangie. I was jack of the unrelliable viscous coupling and decided tom do something about it (my 4WD club mates are tired of my whinging anyway!!).
I picked up a cheap LT230 from ABC auto gear in Brisbane from a wrecked VM diesel Rangie and persued the ongoing task at hand. It was an easy conversion apart from a few small things, but basically it was a bolt in conversion and worth all the swearing and skinned knuckles.
Small things such as:
Handbrake mount was totally diffrent. I tried to use the LT230 one, but the cable fitting is not threaded, but has a retainer clip. I was able to utilise the original VC mounting and drilled and bolted to the gearbox mounting. The two ends I joined together with some strip steel and a copule of pins. It's not scientific, but works just as well as the original.
Speedo cable fitted but the actuall drive diamiter of the cable was diffrent, with the LT230 one a bit bigger thus after some frustrating hours of finding the problem, thuis was all it came down to. Getting a LT230 cable was out of the question (post 1990 Rangies don't have a direct drivingf speedo, but works of some magnetiv type unitr which sends it up to the speedo itself via wire), so a bit of mucking around I was able to swap it over from the viscous coupling unit to the LT230 and it was fixed. It was that simple.
The LT230 front driveshaft is also 40mm shorter, so I decided to buy another front driveshaft from a late model Discovery. I was planning to cut the original one down, but deemed it too expensive and opted for the former.
Apart from that it was straight forward conversion. Would recomend it to anyone who want to get rid of the Viscous Coupling blues!!!
Regards,
Aquarangie
