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It took some time before Gordon Bashford settled on the design of the Land Rover's chassis frame. The original idea of a box-section frame was not his, as Bashford was always careful to
point out; it had been proposed just before the war by Adrian Lombard, a member of the Rover Drawing Office who was seconded to work on the Whittle jet. Lombard later transferred to Rolls-Royce, where he would rise to a very senior position in the aero-enqine division.
Bashford had a first prototype Land Rover frame made with 4.5-inch deep side members, but it twisted too much in stress tests. A second frame with 6-inch deep side members of 12swg steel proved too rigid. However, his third attempt used 6-inch side members made of lighter 14swg steel. This worked and the design was adopted. If the dates in a catalogue of Rover company photographs can be trusted, the first pilot-production chassis had been completed by 24 February 1948. Sadly, like so many other crucial photographs from this period, the negative of that photograph has now been lost, and no prints have yet been found.
Rover planned initially to galvanize the frames to protect them against corrosion, but only the pilot-production chassis were so treated. Probably to save costs and simplify the manufacturing process, the production frames were simply given a protective coat of paint.
However, simply designing the frame was not the end of Bashford's problems. Box-section frames required expensive press tools and jigs, and Maurice Wilks wanted the absolute minimum of new tooling to get the Land Rover into production. So Bashford consulted Chief Production Engineer Olaf Poppe, who devised a way of making the box-sections out of four flat pieces of steel. Any twist that occurred while welding one edge would, he reasoned, correct itself when the opposite edge was welded in turn. With the addition only of a simple jig (nicknamed the 'Christmas tree' because of its shape), Poppe's method was adopted for production. It worked so well that all short-wheelbase Land Rover chassis were made in this way until the demise of the Series III models in 1985.
Posteriormente el prototipo de los hermanos Wilks fue evolucionando al retirar y reemplazar piezas norteamericanas por desarrollos propios y britanicos. Uno de los mayores avances fue el chasis de hierro propuesto por el ingeniero Olaf Poppe quien inspirado en una simple escalera de construccion fabrico un marco en cajon a partir de platinas rectangulares. Este chasis mostro tan buen resultado que no dista mucho de los disenos actuales. Tambien la fabrica Rover probo en los primeros modelos varios motores de sus vehiculos clasicos hasta desarrollar a principios de los 60?s un motor propio de 2250cc que conquisto rapidamente el mercado por su reputacion de “indestructible” y un desempeno que le permitiria mover estas fabulosas maquinas los siguientes 25 anos. Paralelamente se fabrico un motor diesel de igual cilindrada que llevo al Land Rover a convertirse en el sueno de todo granjero. By summer 1947, work on the prototype had been finished. The body was made up of three units that could be independently unbolted from the basic structure, and the chassis was fabricated by welding together strips of steel into a ladder-shaped box. Designed by manufacturing engineer Olaf Poppe, it would become a Land Rover construction hallmark for the next fifty years. Charles Spencer 'Spen' King - a nephew of the Wilks brothers and an engineer who would later play a fundamental role in the Land Rover story - credits Rover manufacturing engineer Olaf Poppe with this solution, which not only saved both time and money, it also resulted in a stronger and more durable chassis than anything yet seen, and would remain a Land Rover construction hallmark for many years. |
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