There have been a lot of thoughts going through my mind and to a fairly large extent I've been influenced by the work of Sam Overton. I'm inspired by his thinking and development and interestingly enough he seems to be pulling ideas from Ute2 for a covert project which he is working on.
To tell the story, Sam built a crazy Range Rover, uted it, put Dana44's under it and wheeled it like there was no tomorrow. When the body was spent he then replaced the body with a SWB LandRover Series IIa body and fitted 42's. Now thats a truck I really like!
As it evolved even further, the Dana44's were replaced with Unimog axles with the wheelbase extended from 100" to about 112" and a Ford Windsor and New Process set of gearboxs fitted and moved rearward to make the famous and exceptionally competitive MogRover.
What seemed to have been learnt from this later resulted in the development of Lockless which was a Defender based truck, with a Rover 3.9V8 ZF LT230 mounted 450mm rearward to improve the weight distribution, mounted on hybrid Rover/Toyota axles and 37" tyres.
Its a combination of these things that I'd like to look at in the next project.
Perhaps
IIa body - ute cab or converted panel van.
Defender 110" chassis
Mid mount V8/Auto/LT230 - LS1/TH/LT230 pref or 3.9/ZF/LT230
LC80 rear axle
Hybrid LC60/80/GQ high pinion front axle
Linked front suspension 2 lower, 1 upper + Panhard
Relinked A frame rear suspension or per front
Tyres undecided - around 40-42"
Registered....
