On Friday Evening, Logistics Coordinator Matt travelled up to Newcastle to collect the team’s Landrover Defender Response Vehicle from Spanner Monkeys, after having its New “Monkey Bars” Roll Cage fitted.
The finished product is a culmination of 3 months of work and communication between the team and Spanner Monkeys, and was far from straight forward. The original brief was simply, “I’d like to have the roof rack taken off and it swapped for a roll cage.” When we took the vehicle up to Newcastle to Spanner Monkeys Workshop and chatted about what we wanted, we all began to realise this was going to be more complex than we had all first planned for.
To start with removing the roof rack was going to be more of a job than it first appeared, as the majority of our blue light system was built into this roof rack, including the internal wiring. After a few conversations back and forth with our original conversion company, the lights were worked free and this just left removing the solid one-piece roof rack, which took multiple people and a forklift as it was so heavy!
Upon measuring up for the roll cage, which was designed and built to fit our vehicle and needs, we realized that the standard mounting points weren’t going to work. Due to the location of our internal stretcher carrying platform, the internal bracing needed moving back, which in turn threw out the location for the chassis mounting points.
Once the basic roll cage had been designed built and fitted, we hit upon the crux of the project, getting it painted, in what was going to be an extremely long cold spell. The finish the Spanner Monkeys Team have achieved is outstanding when we consider that the they were painting in temperatures well below 0 and with more than a foot of snow outside!
Next came the bespoke CNC cut mounts for the lights and aerials, bespoke basket roof cage, light bar mounting, and bespoke snorkel. On top of all this, whilst the vehicle was in the garage the spanner monkeys team gave the vehicle some extra TLC including a new set of headlights and repairing a crack in a fan guard we hadn’t even noticed!
The team would like to thank Peter and his team at Spanner Monkeys for completely surpassing our expectations, with not only an outstanding roll cage and great customer service, but also all the bespoke extras which they kindly gave to the team free of charge!