Not such a bargain
I have bought huge quantities of secondhand parts over the years, and I can count the number of times I have come off badly in a transaction on the fingers of one hand. There was a 200Tdi engine which turned out to have suffered a runaway after the turbo bearings collapsed. I thought it was unusually helpful of the seller that he had not only steam cleaned the engine for me, but taped up all the various ports (including the turbo inlet) to keep the dirt out. It was only when I removed the sticky tape and found half an inch of play in the turbo impeller that I realised I’d been had.
A pair of body side frames for a Station Wagon turned out to be more patch than frame, and I have had a couple of 200Tdis with crank nose damage due to the pulley bolt working loose. To be fair, I only discovered the damage when replacing the timing belt, so it is unlikely the seller would have known about the problem. Having to change the crankshaft on an engine at your own expense puts a big dent in the profit margin on an engine conversion though. I can understand why some of the larger garages refuse flat out to have anything to do with secondhand parts.
If I went down that route I wouldn’t have much of a business. I take some pride in my ability to recycle, renovate and reuse old bits of Land Rover. But sometimes I end up getting a lot deeper into mechanical renovation than I intended or budgeted for. Witness the 300Tdi engine currently sitting on an engine stand in my workshop. It was advertised on an internet group for Land Rover enthusiasts with parts to sell. It was straight out of a rotten Discovery, there was a video of it running, the price was about right and it wasn’t too far away. I fetched it back to the workshop and started preparing it to drop into an old Ninety. The engine was a bit mucky but 300Tdis usually are: they leak oil from the manifold gasket on one side, and from the vacuum pump and oil filter housing on the other.
My usual approach is to strip off any wiring, pipework and ancillaries, clean off the worst of the accumulated gunge, then work through the engine from front to back, starting with a cambelt change and finishing with a new rear crankshaft oil seal. While I was doing the initial prep work I unscrewed the oil filler cap and looked inside, for no particular reason that I can recall. Alarm bells rang. The valve gear looked very clean, far too clean for a diesel that had been running a week earlier and had a six-figure mileage on it. The inside of the rocker cover looked as though it had been steam cleaned. I have seen this kind of thing before on engines where the head gasket has failed, so I decided to lift the head for inspection. This revealed three things: an excellent, unworn set of cylinder bores, a brand-new head gasket, and a small amount of coolant in number three cylinder.
Inspecting the head it was obvious that it had not been skimmed so I hoped that it was just slightly warped, but news came back from the machine shop that it had failed the pressure test, with an internal crack between a waterway and one of the exhaust ports. Obviously I can’t be sure of the sequence of events here but it is possible that the crack was caused by sloppy assembly during a bodged, corners-cut head gasket change: some of the head bolts undid far more easily than others, which is never a good sign.
New non-genuine 300Tdi cylinder heads are ridiculously cheap at the moment. I have fitted a few and the quality seems fine although I cannot say whether they will last 20 years as most of the original Land Rover heads have done. While the engine was apart I took the opportunity to change the main and big end shells. The originals were getting close to the end of their lifespan, with the copper-coloured backing metal starting to show through in a couple of spots. It will be a nice engine for my customer, but I won’t be able to go on holiday on the profit from the job. I’m not going to start pointing fingers at the seller – the vehicle was an abandoned project which he had bought to break, and I have no way of knowing whether the engine was showing any signs of distress when he had it running.
I do my best to source good quality engines for conversions, but the supply is starting to dry up and I suspect I may have to put my prices up as I can see this kind of rectification work becoming more common. The last 200Tdi I bought needed a new head gasket, and the 300Tdi before that had a badly-worn oil pump drive which meant changing the crankshaft. These engines aren’t getting any younger: a bit like me.