Upgrading the Dogger

After the last big trip we had some jobs to do,

Front lights

Mainly for two reasons, dip beam was poor and the cheap led bar on the roof just lit up the bonnet. now the KC daylighter have the best dip beam going and 4 x lazer LED’s make it all come alive on High beam.

This is how the front looked with the RRS grill not fitting right, we inherited this with the donor car, and I was never too happy with the look.

The hair look to the 3D is because I forgot to add support to the 3D print 🙁 but it’s only prototype so it wasn’t a problem.

Cab heating upgrade

The internal heating is done by a small radiator and underfloor heating, the fan on the radiator wasn’t very powerful so I added a second and a nice grill to hide it.

Radiator upgrade

I had an alloy radiator but on extreme climbs and hi ambient temps it still overheated, Now I know the M57 had some issues with heating and the M57N fixed them but on all the Dakar cars we never suffered on the early engine.

the OE design of rad take the water in from the top and does a loop around and exits the Top on the turbo side.

I decided to dow away with this and make it conventional, basical out at the bott of the rad, the water pump is in a better place on the M57 than the original M51 so it was easy.A small cut in the top of the rad removed the divider and the exit pipe welded in the base.

here’s some images just in case you want to copy it.

Roof lifting.

the roof didn’t work out as light as I had wanted, nearly 35kgs.the struts don’t do anything when fully closed by design and the problem was the initial lift.

This isn’t a problem for someone my size but the wife is small and in an emergency she may not be able to raise the roof or lower it down.

so I have added a Pneumatic cylinder in the corner to help lift, I already have air all around the car and a custom car manual air switch operates it simply.

It works well.