Savaged Sump
What is your favourite Land Rover repair tool? The one you use more than anything else? Judging by some of the stuff I see coming into the workshop, for many people the answer would be a hammer and chisel. Big hammers have their uses: a judiciously-placed blow from a 2 lb club hammer can save an awful lot of time fiddling about (as in the differential removal mentioned above). As for sharp-pointed chisels, there are a couple of legitimate purposes, such as bending back the locking tabs on hub nuts prior to undoing said hub nuts with the correct 52 mm socket or box spanner. Unfortunately, having a chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other, many people then go on to chisel the hub nuts loose, which makes a bit of a mess of them. It is quite unusual for me to find hub nuts that do not have deep gouges in them. It is also quite unusual to find a nut locking tab which hasn’t been hammered flat and reused. A long time ago in rural Lincolnshire I came across a Series IIA abandoned at the roadside: an entire wheel and hub assembly had come off the stub axle, leaving the vehicle supported on that corner by the half-shaft resting inside the axle tube. I wondered if the owner of that one had reused the hub nut locking tab...
I recently came across another example of using a chisel as a substitute for a suitably-sized spanner or socket. The vehicle was a very tidy though well-used example of a Series IIA 109 inch diesel, in for a routine service, and having taken it for a test drive and warmed it up, the last job before it was returned to its owner was to change the engine oil and filter. The sump drain plug on most 2.25 engines is 13/16 in AF, which is as near to 21 mm as makes no difference. This is not an especially unusual size. I used a breaker bar to loosen the sump plug, expecting that once broken loose it would unscrew by hand, but it turned out to be tight on the threads, needing to be wound out all the way with a ratchet. The usual cause of this is that the sump plug has been massively overtightened or cross-threaded, damaging the threaded boss in the sump. However, in this case the reason was that the sump plug had been sealed with liberal amounts of PTFE tape rather than the correct copper crush washer.
Nothing unusual there: sump washers are one of those things that people never remember to buy when planning an oil change. I keep a full range of them on the shelf, so I grabbed one from the parts store, then started peeling away the PTFE tape to clean up the sump plug. At this point I discovered why the last person to change the oil had used tape rather than a sealing washer. Someone had used a very sharp chisel to undo the sump plug, and had managed to make a cut right across the sealing face. So it would have leaked no matter how tightly it was done up. A second trip to the parts store turned up a good secondhand sump plug which was installed with a new washer – job done.