Unless you have the legs of a giraffe, getting in and out of the back of the vehicle is going to be a challenge and it’ll wear the knees of your trousers out.
Not a Genuine Land Rover part, this one comes from Bearmach, (a step up in quality from Britpart) The kit seems to be quite robust but the paint finish isn’t that great and I can see rust forming sooner rather than later. That said, it’s now possible to get in and out of the back easily.
Series vehicles were also fitted with similar side steps to aid ingress and egress from the front seat but these are not allowed in Switzerland.
New rear step as delivered
First of all, the two split pins on either end of the hinge bar are removed and the step and fixing bracket separated
There’s only 4 bolt holes in the mounting bracket, so what the rest of this is for is open to debate… there’s no fitting guide
Main bracket fitted. It’s fairly obvious where the main fixings go. I left the fixings quite loose in order to have some play in the string retainer (upper left) to assist fitting the strong spring.
Rear step and hinge bar
Step fitted to the bracket, spring installed and everything tightened up. Yay.
Next task was to fit the rubber buffer to the cross member. The kit of parts came with an M6 rivnut, so the chassis will need to be drilled to fit the aluminium insert. An M6 rivnut requires an 8.5mm hole to be drilled. I don’t have a drill bit this size, so I drilled 8mm and using a rats tail file, enlarged the hole to 8.5mm
Buffer, centre punch and the place it will be fitted (circled)
Rivnut tapped home
Mandrel screwed into the insert and tool
… and fully compressed.
Oddly the bag of assorted fixings did not have an M6 bolt that fitted through for this buffer. Fortunately, I have quite a large collection of odd fixings 🙂 (dap of copper slip used on the thread)
Left over parts…. I can only assume, as the kit is also for side steps, these would be used in fixing them. Still, they’ll come in useful for something along the way.
Little Green Landy 