I have been the owner of a 1996 Landrover 300TDi 110 CSW for the last 22 years. I had wanted a Landrover from the days of watching the Camel Trophy event and marvelling at their ability to survive and go places others couldn’t reach. After many years of waiting, marriage, family, work, … I finally reached the stage in life where I could afford to buy one. I managed to find the Landrover locally with only 6000 miles on the clock and only the one previous owner. The Landrover was built for export to the Middle East but in the end never got shipped and sat in a Landrover factory warehouse for a few years until it was sold to the previous owner.
I’m about to retire and while no longer expecting to circumnavigate the world or spend months in the wilds of Africa or Australia, I do plan on trips around Europe, Scandinavia and lots of shorter trips in the UK. Over the years the Landy had gained some additions, like long range fuel tanks, on-board water tank, dual battery system, extra gauges, lots of switches and dials. The last few MOTs had needed more and more attention to things like rust on the chassis and the age of the vehicle was showing with a drop in reliability and confidence in the ability to get home. I made the decision two years ago to go for a full restoration. This has been a two year project involving a 100% rebuild of the entire vehicle including a new chassis, full engine rebuild and I’m just awaiting the upgraded interior to come back from the upholsterers. One of the main aims was to make the Landrover look as standard as possible, but using seriously upgraded parts, and that also meant the removal of the extra gauges, buttons and various mods/bodges that have accumulated over the years. The vehicle is going to look original but I didn’t want to miss out on some of the additions that the Landrover enjoyed, like a Boost gauge, EGT, TPMS, and the sophisticated cooling system that I had installed.
This is how the dash looks completely standard and how I want it to look aftr the restoration, but shiney and new :-)
My solution for the extra gauges is to reproduce the clock and have ‘hidden’ gauges that pop up when attention is needed or that I can select manually. Here is a close up of the original clock and my reproduction. I took a couple of liberties as the straight hands were programmatically more efficient than the tapered ones on the real clock and I also added the old landrover logo to mine. My original didn’t have it but there are clocks with both the old flash logo and the newer oval logo.
As I worked on this project it inevitably suffered from feature creep. When I designed the expansion board I realised I could incorporate monitoring of my cooling system, handle the switching from day to night mode. Defender gauges light up with a green glow and suffer from light bleed over the dial which I tried to replicate. My gauges feature images of my Landrover and I made the lights come on when it is dark…
I also realised that I could make it more generic, so useful for any vehicle with 52mm gauges. To that end it became configurable with replaceable images on the SDCard. If you want your partner’s voice telling you the car is going to tip over you can do that too and it actually waits until you are really likely to tip over…
I finished up with multiple possible versions. The gauge only, with touch and/or button interface, which provides clock, TPMS, tilt and incline screens. Add the additional expansion board to add EGT, Boost, Coolant temperature, Coolant level, lights on/off, ignition on/off and a compass. You can then add the fan relay board to have a sophisticated cooling solution including disabling fans for wading.
I decided to make the whole project Open Source so that others who might be interested can either use what I have done or use it as a base for their own project. I actually discovered that a new old stock clock for my Defender is £487 inc VAT. I had 5 sets of PCB made in China by PCBWay including the assembly of the board for less than the cost of one replacement clock. I think I will have to pass the original clock down the family as an heirloom. An EGT and a Boost gauge from someone like Stack run to £250 a piece so this Landy Gauge with a parts cost of about £150 is a real bargain :-)