GO FOR BROKE

Steve Miller commits to breaking the ‘Grand Rover’ Discovery in the hope it’s 300Tdi will be a better engine for his early Ninety

Remember Grand Rover – the Discovery I bought for the LRM thousand pound challenge? Well, it’s been dragged out kicking and screaming from Farmer David’s bottom shed. I make reference to it being the bottom shed because any vehicle relegated to be stored in there is usually unlikely to ever see the light of day again. The top sheds are allocated for vehicles likely to gain an MOT at least in the next few years.

Once we cleared the overgrown weeds away to allow the barn door to fully open, the Discovery looked to be in a sorry old state. The local pigeon population must have decided that the best place to stay was in the rafters over the top of it. Well, you can probably imagine the mess they’d made after its six-month lay-up.

Attaching a semi-charged battery, the 300Tdi soon coughed into life, which encouraged the remaining few pigeons to vacate promptly. A long squirt of screen wash aided my vision through the windscreen as I peered through the white smears. I selected first gear and drove on out, giving the brakes a quick dab to ensure I could stop again. Six months ago, the Disco entered the shed with just a few weeks’ MOT remaining, and it was clear then that significant work (mainly welding) would need to be completed before a fresh ticket was ever issued. I felt kind of guilty that my intension was to break it for its engine, disc-braked back axle and power steering to transfer over into my early Ninety. At least this has a proven engine, however, having covered a few hundred miles to Red Wharf Bay and back as part of the LRM challenge.

Over the next few hours, myself and my mate Pete set about taking it to pieces. We spent the majority of the time removing the engine and all ancillaries for the engine conversion. Fortunately for Farmer David, he owns another Discovery, in exactly the same colour, which sits around doing not a lot, but if it does get used again and damaged in any way, at least he would have a load of matching panels to replace them with. It’s actually quite surprising how much stuff there is to remove from a Disco and how timeconsuming it is.

If you recall, one of the Grand Rover challenges we did as a group was to put our vehicles through a rolling road session. Not surprisingly, my Discovery was down on power from its original

factory-quoted figure of 111 bhp. Then again, there is 168k showing on the clock. What was more shocking was that a few more horses had escaped over the years than I’d expected. I recall that as I accelerated and the turbo whistled up, it would seem like the engine was restricted somehow, almost like it was running out of breath. This was reflected in the dismal graph handed to me at the rolling road session. At least it gave the others something to poke fun at me about for the rest of the day. Fortunately I think I may well have found the issue. The Disco had been retro-fitted with a snorkel, albeit a non-branded and cheap-looking aftermarket item. I was trying to remove it from the front wing but couldn’t see how it was attached – with no obvious bolts on show. I pulled at it in frustration and it started to come unstuck. The snorkel had been secured to the air box with some kind of black silicon or gutter type sealant. In fact, it was still sticky and a real job to get off my hands. The large quantity used had filled the pipe by about a third. Now I’m no expert, but a snorkel restricts air-flow into an engine ever-soslightly anyway, let alone with that gunk blocking the engine’s air intake. The engine’s power may well be restored but I’ll have to wait and see when it finally makes its way into the Ninety and put through a similar rolling-road session.

Next up was the Ninety. There was no time like the present to start the conversion process to Tdi power. I decided to SORN it with DVLA and set to work. In the first stage of the conversion, I needed to remove the 2.5 naturally-aspirated engine. This took far less time than the Disco, just four hours in fact. Obviously this has opened up a can of worms now because I still need to continue breaking it so at least there isn’t a dead Disco sitting in Farmer David’s yard, and I also need to prepare the engine bay in the Ninety to accept the 300Tdi. As the nights are fast drawing in, it leaves me very little time, especially as I haven’t got round to building a workshop at our new house yet. When will I learn?