Back to life
JUST lately I have had quite a few vehicles sent to me for recommissioning after they have been stored out of use for a while. In theory this should be a fairly simple task, but if a Land Rover has been taken out of use there is usually a reason for it, and if the vehicle has changed hands while in storage the new owner may not know why it was taken off the road in the first place.
The early Series III currently occupying my workshop is a typical example: stored for ten years and only used sporadically for a few years before that. Its long period in storage has mostly been kind to it. It is a very original, unspoilt example of the kind of old Series vehicle I was picking up 15 years ago for a few hundred pounds. Prices have gone up dramatically since then, which may help explain why I am now being asked to return so many old Land Rovers to full working order.
The Series III had been dropped off by trailer a couple of months previously as a non-urgent project and had not been running especially well when delivered, so the first task on a cold wet day was to persuade it into life so that I could move it out of the compound and into the workshop. It had the good old two and a quarter petrol engine with a Weber carburettor and electronic ignition. I had rather hoped it would fire up easily, but it took a jump start and a lot of cranking on the starter before it spluttered into life on one, then two cylinders. Plenty of revs delivered just enough power to overcome the sticking brakes and drag the beast into the workshop so that I could work on it in the dry.
The first job was to find where the missing cylinders had gone. There are several possible reasons why a Series petrol engine might drop a cylinder. Loss of compression is one possibility. These engines were built to run on leaded petrol – even now, some 30 years after the sale of leaded four-star was banned, many vehicles have yet to be converted to run on unleaded. The conversion involves removing the cylinder head, then sending it to a machine shop to have the exhaust valve seats machined out and hardened inserts pressed in. New valves and guides complete the job. Fuel additives are available to protect the valves and seats on an unmodified engine, but not everyone uses them. Treated gently, the two and a quarter may run for many years on straight unleaded with no problems, but hard work and high revs will eventually cause pitting and erosion of the valve seats, leading to loss of compression.
Another cause of compression loss is failure of the head gasket. On the Series petrol engine this is most common with the older copper head gasket, which will sometimes burn away between two adjacent cylinders. The later coated composite head gaskets are less prone to failure and can be fitted to the earlier engines. Land Rover recommend fitting hardened washers (part number ERC6821) to the cylinder head bolts if a composite head gasket is used in place of a copper one. Normally if an engine has little or no compression on one or more cylinders it will be obvious when cranking it over on the starter. The faulty cylinder will offer less resistance to the starter, so you will hear it speed up as it kicks over the dead cylinder.
On this Series III I was not hearing anything that suggested a lack of compression, and in any case it is usually best to start with the simplest, cheapest causes of faults and then work upwards. So I fetched four new spark plugs from the store. The old ones looked to be in a reasonable state, but two of them were wet and black which suggested that they had not been doing anything useful just lately. With the new plugs in the engine now ran on four cylinders but would not idle or pick up cleanly. I popped the cap off the distributor and found lots of condensation on the inside, but even with the distributor internals dried out the engine barely ran.
The Weber 34ICH carburettor is not an especial favourite of mine. It was sold for many years as an economy fitment for Series vehicles, which it achieved mainly through strangling the engine by being too small for the job. The same carburettor was sold as an aftermarket replacement for 1300cc Ford engines among others. Fitted to a Series Land Rover it can be prone to icing in cold weather (although this seems to vary from one installation to another) and can suffer from internal blockages, especially on a vehicle which has been left standing. I have spent far too many hours
over the years stripping, cleaning and generally fiddling with these carburettors to no useful effect. For a while they were the only new replacement carburettor available for Series vehicles, but new Chinese-made reproductions of the original Zenith 36IV carburettor are now available at about the same price I would charge for overhauling a Weber, and with better results. I normally keep one on the shelf for just this situation – I unboxed it, bolted it on, turned the key and the engine settled down to a nice, smooth 750 rpm idle. I checked the ignition timing with a strobe gun and it was miles out. A bit of tweaking of ignition and carburettor settings had the old engine running, I suspect, better than it had done for many years.
Now that the engine idled properly I could hear a nasty rumbling noise from the front of the engine. Either the water pump or the alternator was in a poor state. I removed the fan belt, spun both by hand and it was the alternator that needed replacing. I took the opportunity to upgrade it to the slightly more modern, 45 amp A127 alternator fitted to the Defender 200Tdi (part number STC229). This is a direct swap for the original 16ACR alternator and more durable in my experience. Electrics are usually a problem on vehicles which have been standing, but this one just needed a couple of bulbs and some fresh wiper blades. Even the screenwash pump still worked, which is highly unusual.
Apart from electrics, there are two other areas which are very likely to give problems on a vehicle which has been stored unused for a while. The first is brakes. Brake fluid absorbs water over time – on drum braked vehicles, small amounts of fluid seeping past the wheel cylinder seals can cause the pistons to corrode inside the bores, resulting in seized brakes. Replacement cylinders are cheap. In any case, you will need to flush the system through with fresh fluid, and in doing so it is quite likely that some or all of the bleed nipples on the cylinders will either round off or shear off. On this vehicle I replaced all four wheel cylinders, the flexible hose between the chassis and rear axle which was badly perished, and a couple of steel brake pipes which had been eaten away by rust and were overdue for replacement with copper ones. The master cylinder seemed fine, with a nice smooth action and no sign of leakage.
The second problem you may encounter is oil leaks. Seals can dry out or stick to the metal surfaces, resulting in oil leaks from just about everywhere when the vehicle is returned to the road. Sure enough this little Series III returned from road test dripping oil from the front and rear seals on the transfer box. Normally this would not be too difficult a problem to deal with, but the road test revealed a rather more serious issue in the shape of a gearbox which made a deafening racket in every gear except top. This usually indicates a layshaft issue. I have not yet removed the gearbox for inspection, but I would bet money on the bolt securing the layshaft to the front bearing having worked loose. It is a common problem on the Series III gearbox – eventually the back end of the layshaft chews up the gearbox casing and a full rebuild is required. I am hoping that this gearbox has not reached that stage yet. At least I will be able to deal with the oil leaks while the gearbox is out.
Other problems you may encounter when recommissioning an old Land Rover include stale petrol (diesel seems to last better than petrol unless it is elderly homemade biodiesel in the tank, in which case you may end up having to replace the entire fuel system), tyres flat-spotted through standing, clutch hydraulic system issues and, if you are unlucky, a clutch plate rusted to the flywheel so that no gears can be selected with the engine running. Sometimes it is possible to free a stuck clutch using methods too dangerous for me to be encouraging via this column. It is worth leaving the engine to idle until hot before trying anything more drastic. Unless the vehicle was put away immediately after deep wading had filled the bellhousing with water, the rust bond between clutch and flywheel is unlikely to be very strong and normal clutch action often returns once the engine has warmed up.