TORQUETALK
Owning older vehicles and using them constantly off-road often translates to shed time for maintenance jobs. My Discovery is no exception. There are always those lit tle jobs and sometimes much larger ones that need attending to. In my case – of late – that has meant replacing engine mounts, a blown light bulb and holder, brake light pedal switch, plus a bent rear trailing arm.
The engine mount should have been a straightforward task especially with the Disco up on axle stands and with the use of the engine lif ter to pull the engine up enough to get the old mount out and the new one in.
Well it was easy to get the old one out as it was in two pieces, but it was not so easy to get the new one back in. Trying from the top and also from underneath it didn’t seem to want to go in. The stud on the new non-genuine parts engine mount seemed to be a few millimetres longer than the old one. Enlisting an assistant so that we had one working from the top and another underneath, plus with the engine lif ted as high as we could, we eventually managed to hold our tongues just right and got it in place but not before the engine lif ter had lif ted the engine up into the firewall and was starting to lif t the vehicle.
When replacing one engine mount the other is likely to be close to breaking as well so it is a good idea to replace both at the same time which we did. That one went a lit tle easier but by then we had learnt the lessons on how to sneak it into place.
The bulb was the left rear stop/ tail light bulb which in theory can be changed by reaching through an aperture in the rear and removing the bulb in its holder. More often than not, of course, that is easier said than done. I managed to get the bulb out and, yes, the bulb holder was rather burnt on one side and had shorted out the bulb and melted the plastic bulb holder. Not sure why it did this though. Maybe water got inside the light, but why only the stop/ tail light?
To get the bulb holder back in is done by ‘ feel’ as you cannot see in at the same time and the replacement bulb holder didn’t want to go back in. So, a ‘quick bulb change’ came down to removing the rear light unit completely which was also lightly melted where the bulb holder slotted in. I resorted to replacing the light unit completely in the end and also the rubber seal around the light to ensure that if it was water ingress, it wasn’t going to happen again anytime soon.
The brake light pedal switch is mounted under the dash on the pedal box and when you push the brake pedal it releases the switch, activating the brake lights. I only noticed that the brake lights weren’t working when hooking up a trailer and we checked to ensure all lights were working and there were no brake lights. Thinking it was the trailer plug I fiddled with that until I realised the stop lights weren’t working on the vehicle.
Again the brake light switch location is not an easy place to get to and access requires opening the lower dash cover and reaching in through the virtually impenetrable mass of wiring while holding down the brake pedal to get behind the switch to pull out the retainer and release the switch from its mount. It’s a job best done when no one is around as you continually question the family heritage of the person who designed the set-up in the first place! Once the switch is out it’s actually easier to put the new switch in.
The rear trailing arm on the left rear had a rather big bend in it from riding over big boulders in a river. I had crossed the river many times before and knew there were large boulders mid-stream but this time the river was running higher than normal due to heavy rain and the boulders were under the water. As well as damaging chassis outriggers, and the trailing arm, I also bent the track rod and destroyed the new steering damper.
Replacing the arm was relatively easy enough in the end. I had a second-hand one available so gave that a clean and a quick paint before jacking up the vehicle onto axle stands. Then it was a case of undoing the large 30mm nut at the chassis end and the single bolt at the axle housing then prising it out. Getting the replacement arm in meant having to move the housing back a bit further and the use of a larger hammer to get it in place. As always I use copper grease on all bolts to ensure they come undone easily next time.
While those jobs are ticked off the list, there is an even longer list still to do and I am sure with the tightening of WoF inspections that list will be even bigger.