NORFOLK GARAGE
AFTER a lifetime spent in the motor trade, Dave the landlord quite often introduces me to words and ideas from 1970s Essex garageland that I have not come across before. Cup rings, for example: they are what happens to a vehicle when it sits around in the workshop for so long that people start using it as a convenient flat surface for coffee mugs, leaving circular impressions in the dust. The other day I was half way through changing the rear axle on my little Peugeot 106 when Dave wandered in. “Another homer,” he said. Another what? “Homer.” I asked him to translate. It turned out that he was referring to the fact that I was working on my own car, rather than one belonging to a paying customer.
It is an old joke in the motor trade that the vehicle you absolutely do not want to buy is one owned by someone who works in a garage, as it probably hasn’t had an oil change in 30,000 miles. There may be some truth in that: if you have spent all day wrestling with mechanical repairs on dull modern cars, the last thing you are likely to want to do in your free time is carry out a service on your own dull modern car. A friend of mine in the trade (who shall remain nameless) had the transfer box on his 4x4 seize solid from lack of oil. He reluctantly admitted that he hadn’t checked the oil level in the three years he had owned the vehicle. I have in the past been guilty of neglecting vehicles, although not with such dramatic consequences. But one thing I have learned in the time I have been running my business is that there are two things that keep an older vehicle running reliably: regular use and regular servicing.
I rely on my vehicles to get me to work and back every day. If I don’t work, I don’t earn. So I no longer begrudge spending a couple of hours from time to time fixing mechanical issues before they become serious enough to leave me stranded. The Peugeot had suffered a failed bearing in one of the rear suspension arms, which is a fault that has probably sent more of these little cars to the scrapyard than anything else. The bearings are notoriously difficult to change, so I opted for a recon
ditioned axle assembly at a cost of £200. The car itself cost me £82, three years and 35,000 miles ago. Spending that kind of money on a 20-year-old tin box might seem insane to some people, but what chance of finding another good, reliable, well-maintained car for £200? Of course if I were having to pay someone else to do the job and looking at a £500 bill it might have been a different story.
In any case I needed the Peugeot back in action quickly, because I had just agreed to sell ‘Piglet’, my scruffy but dependable Discovery 300Tdi. Piglet was one of the most solid old Discos I have seen, lovely to drive and mechanically fully sorted, so why would I get rid of the old girl? For the usual Land Rover enthusiast reason: I had been offered another one. Piglet was a five-door automatic: what I really wanted was a three-door manual, and preferably a 200Tdi as they are now becoming very hard to find, and I had it in mind to acquire one for restoration while I still could. When one of my customers emailed me to ask whether I was interested in buying his original and unbodged 1993 Discovery 200Tdi three-door manual I didn’t take too long to make a decision, and when he said he would take Piglet in
“One of my favourite phrases, born of long experience not just with Land Rovers but with life in general is “it’s cheap for a reason””
exchange for his 200Tdi and a lump of cash my way, the cake was well and truly iced.
One of my favourite phrases, born of long experience not just with Land Rovers but with life in general is “it’s cheap for a reason”. My new Disco was cheap for two reasons: the indicators and hazard flashers didn’t work, and the gearbox refused to select fifth gear. The owner had been toying with the idea of asking me to sort the problems for him, but decided to off load the vehicle instead, leaving me with only the Peugeot for transport until I had worked some mechanical magic on this latest homer. The gearbox, I decided, could wait a while: there is barely a straight stretch of road between my home and the workshop, so the absence of fifth gear was no great nuisance. Indicators on the other hand are a legal requirement, so I set about what I hoped would be a fairly simple task.
The indicator and hazard flasher circuits are fed from different sources: the indicators only work when the ignition is on, the hazards operate whether ignition is on or off. The two circuits have separate fuses. The previous owner had already replaced the hazard switch, column stalk and flasher relay with no joy. Locking the vehicle with the remote caused all the indicators to flash three times as they should. Pressing the hazard switch made it light up but did nothing else. The vehicle still had the original single-button remote locking and alarm, but the built-in immobiliser had been bypassed and an aftermarket one installed. I set about pulling out bits of dashboard to gain access to the Discovery’s electrical innards, probed around with a multimeter, consulted a wiring diagram and became more and more puzzled. Applying power directly to the flasher relay caused the indicators to flash, but there seemed to be no power going to the relay from either the switched or unswitched circuits. Finally I thought to check the fuses. And that, dear reader, is how I found out that on a Discovery 200Tdi, if the fuse for the hazard flashers blows, the direction indicators stop working even though they are theoretically on a different circuit.
I was now able to drive my new Land Rover on the road for the first time. It seemed to go well enough but there was a strange shuddering vibration on bumps. I guessed that the sliding splined joint on one of the propshafts had seized solid, and I guessed correctly. The rear propshaft came off with no problems (and I replaced a leaking differential flange seal while it was off) but the front was absolutely solid. With the front axle on stands I had to put my trusty tractor jack under the front crossmember and jack the chassis up away from the axle to free the propshaft so it could be removed. This is a not uncommon problem on older Land Rovers: the sliding splines are coated with plastic which deteriorates with age, water gets in, the splines start to rust and the whole lot seizes solid. The parts store yielded a good secondhand propshaft. Still in the first flush of enthusiasm that always comes with buying a new Land Rover I was desperate to get on and change the gearbox but Dave’s voice nagged away inside my head: that’s enough homers, now get back to earning money. I had an ex-military One Ten in for a 200Tdi conversion and high ratio transfer box: a totally straightforward job on a freshly rebuilt vehicle with lots of shiny new fasteners and no rust to thwart progress. The only unpredictable element was that the owner had asked me to take a look at the gearbox: although bearing a plate showing that it had been reconditioned for the Ministry of Defence a few years earlier, it leaked fluid and crunched badly when selecting third gear. I was up against a fairly tight deadline with not much room for things to go wrong: naturally, things started going wrong.
When stripping an LT77 gearbox, the first job is to remove the collar from the back of the mainshaft, allowing the fifth gear extension housing to be separated from the main gearbox case. This collar is a fairly tight interference fit on the shaft: I have a modified bearing separator which normally makes short work of them. Not this time: I had to use the weapon of last resort (oxy-acetylene torch) to heat the collar before it would budge. Next for attention was the fifth gear synchromesh hub. This is a splined fit on the back of the mainshaft, and normally pulls off without too much trouble. On this gearbox the hub was so firmly attached to the mainshaft that it might as well have been welded on. In the end I wound the puller as tight as I dared, then bounced a pair of long tyre levers under the puller legs. This shifted the recalcitrant hub but took a couple of dog teeth off fifth gear in the process.
Sitting at the back of the workshop was an LT77 gearbox from a Discovery, same specification as the first one (suffix H), condition unknown. This one came apart with no trouble at all, yielding a perfect fifth gear and a much better mainshaft than the one in the first gearbox, which had slight wear to the splines which transmit drive to the transfer box. I stripped down the mainshaft on the first gearbox and carefully inspected the components for third gear. The synchromesh baulk ring looked almost new. Perhaps too new – it had clearly not bedded in to the cone on third gear, possibly due to being made of the wrong grade of metal. I could see no other faults so I reassembled the gearbox using the mainshaft from the second box, new baulk rings from a reputable supplier, and seals, bearings and gaskets as required. There are various clearances and tolerances which need to be measured: all of these were within limits.
The gearbox went back together with no bother, apart from me forgetting to set the position of the selector spool before bolting the main case to the carrier plate, which probably cost me about five minutes. Before mating up the gearbox to the transfer box I put a couple of litres of ATF fluid in it, then rotated it through all planes to thoroughly coat all the internals in fluid before start-up. It selected all gears smoothly and I was reasonably confident that all would be well. With the new engine in and plumbed up I turned the key and felt my heart sink. The gearbox had a clearly audible rattle at idle. I took the vehicle for a test drive: the gearbox was silent under load, silent on the overrun and had a very smooth, sweet change action with no crunching or awkwardness. But it still rattled at idle. I have come across rattly LT77S before, but not one that I personally have assembled.
It was now Saturday evening and the vehicle was booked on a ferry on Monday evening. I contacted the customer (a keen enthusiast with a fair amount of mechanical experience) and after discussing the options we agreed that the two of us would set to work first thing Sunday morning, remove and strip the gearbox and see if we could find out what was causing the rattle. Bright and early on Sunday the customer turned up, I started his vehicle to demonstrate the rattle, and he said “that’s exactly how it has been since I bought it”. He had already spoken to a respected transmission specialist about the rattle, and been told that it was probably harmless. The vehicle had no floor mats or transmission tunnel cover which possibly made the gearbox sound worse than it was.
The upshot of all this was that the customer was more than happy to take the vehicle away, rattle and all, and I was left with an empty workshop and a Sunday which I had already mentally
written off as a day of manhandling Land Rover gearboxes for no financial reward. I had a Discovery needing a gearbox change, all the bits I needed to do the job, and a whole day to do it. It was time for another homer.
The gearbox I had lined up for the job was an R380 from a Discovery 300Tdi which I had acquired as an engine donor. I hadn’t actually driven the vehicle (no MOT, no brakes), but you can learn a certain amount about a gearbox through draining the oil. This one gave me a good quantity of clean golden MTF94, and nothing more than the usual small quantity of iron filings on the magnet in the middle of the drain plug.
The R380 gearbox is actually a bit longer than the LT77. The bellhousing (on a Discovery Tdi) is shorter on the R380, so that the overall length of gearbox and bellhousing is exactly the same, and the bellhousing stud pattern is identical on both gearboxes. As a result an R380 will drop straight into a 200Tdi Discovery: the reverse light switch terminals are different, and you need to use the differential lock linkage from the 300Tdi as the lever pivot hole was moved slightly on the R380, so the 200Tdi components will not fit. Seeing as the gearbox and transfer box needed to be separated anyway I removed the transfer box first, then supported the gearbox on the tractor jack, removed the crossmember and dropped the rear end of the gearbox just enough to be able to get a socket onto the top three bellhousing nuts.
The clutch had been dragging slightly and the friction plate was fairly worn. I had a nearly new clutch sitting around which had come off a Tdi donor vehicle and was too good to throw away, so this went on with a new release bearing. I was just contemplating the best way to lift the gearbox back into place when the Boy appeared as if by magic and asked me whether I needed a hand.
In no time at all the gearbox and transfer box were back in the vehicle, and I was starting to look forward to my Sunday roast dinner when I ran into problems with the handbrake. For some reason the ratchet refused to hold, no matter how much I doused it in WD-40 and worked the mechanism back and forth.
By now I was tired and grumpy: I can offer no other explanation as to why I spent more than an hour piddling about with this handbrake lever, before remembering that I had another one in a box in the office. I finally got home some time after eight. At least the new gearbox works perfectly.