Norfolk Garage
Disco axle rot, Td5 initiation and a man down... Richard Hall has been busy
Iam fortunate enough to have several hobbies and interests beside Land Rovers. If I have had a particularly bad day in the workshop I can go home and do something completely different. My father is a keen (and very skilled) railway modeller, and passed on his enthusiasm to me at an early age. Could there be a greater contrast between fitting a new set of leaf springs to a Series III, and constructing a tiny working model locomotive from scraps of brass and plastic? The difference is less than you might think: Land Rovers and model trains both rely on the application of basic engineering principles to keep them running properly. And both have 12 volt electrics: one of the reasons I am so comfortable working on old Land Rover electrical systems is that I learned to use a soldering iron at the age of eight, wiring up section switches for the giant train set in my bedroom.
I was invited to take my current model railway up north for a two-day exhibition in Redcar on Teesside and decided to make a holiday of it. The coastline in this region is beautiful, with miles of unspoilt beaches, and there is no shortage of places to visit. I collected my caravan from storage, pumped up the tyres, checked everything still worked, and gave my old Discovery 200Tdi a quick check-over to make sure it was fit for the long journey. All seemed well – the beast has been in almost daily use recently and has given not a moment’s trouble.
On the morning of departure I went to fill up with diesel, and as I braked to a halt at the pumps the nose of the Discovery bobbed up and down a couple of times, as if one of the shock absorbers wasn’t doing its job properly. I thought that a little odd – I had replaced the rear shocks a month previously, and the fronts had been changed just before I acquired the vehicle. The caravan was parked at the workshop, so I thought I had better take a quick look at the suspension when I got there.
The cause of the problem was easy enough to spot. The lower mounting bracket for the offside rear shock absorber had broken clean off the axle. On close inspection I found that it had corroded through at the outer end where it butts up against the brake backplate: the entire bracket had been repeatedly bent up and down until the other end fractured from metal fatigue. There was a substantial build-up of dried mud between the backplate and the remains of the bracket, which had both encouraged and concealed the rusting process.
When you are about to embark on a 250-mile journey and already running late, the last thing you need is to have to get out your MIG welder and start sticking broken bits of vehicle back together. But it was either that or cancel the trip. To make matters worse I was dressed for going on holiday, not for crawling around underneath old Land Rovers. Ever resourceful, I stripped down to my underpants and put on a set of overalls, together with an old pair of work boots that I have been meaning to throw away for ages. In record time I had the bracket firmly reattached to the axle. It is not the prettiest welded repair I have ever made, but plenty strong enough.
I packed away the welder, dropped the vehicle back onto its wheels and then had
an unhelpful thought: what about the rest of the axle? The nearside shock mount was nice and solid, not so the nearside trailing arm bracket, one side of which turned out to be made of rust scale and disintegrated when poked with a screwdriver. I have had a couple of vehicles in for repair where a trailing arm bracket has broken away from the axle, resulting in rather alarming rear-wheel steering. Mud gets trapped between the bracket and trailing arm, and rots the sides of the bracket out from inside. The bracket itself can be paper-thin and still appear fine from the outside – by the time a hole appears, there isn’t a lot of strength left in the structure. In this case, only one side of one bracket was affected so I welded in a triangle of 3 mm steel to beef it up, cleaned myself up as best I could, hitched up the caravan and set off, two hours late and wondering whether a 500-mile round trip in a restoration project Discovery towing a caravan was really such a good idea.
After this rather shaky start, the old truck was absolutely good as gold. We headed north up the A1 at a steady 55
“My father is a keen (and very skilled) railway modeller, and passed on his enthusiasm to me at an early age.”
mph, water temperature bang on the halfway mark, forging up hills as if the towbar only had a balloon on a string attached to it rather than a ton of ageing Swift Challenger (he caravan was built in 1989 and goes rather well with a Discovery 200Tdi, I think).
Fuel consumption for the entire trip was around 35 mpg, and the only issue was that after four hours on the road, the heat from the engine and transmission started to become a little oppressive. It was a hot day and I ended up having to drive with all the windows half-open. At some point I will have to look into retrofitting air conditioning using parts from an engine donor Discovery.
Oh yes, and the model railway exhibition went well, too.
Back home, and the Discovery doesn’t have a lot of time left to run on the current MOT certificate. I was hoping to find the time to sort out the rust in the sills properly, but right now all my spare time is taken up with renovating an old house that my wife and I have bought, so I suspect the sills will just have to be patched and plated for this year’s test, and the beast taken off the road for a few days over the winter to do the job properly. It has certainly earned the right to be repaired to a decent standard, but I think I will be hunting around for a better rear axle. The one currently fitted has a noisy differential as well as corrosion problems, and Disco rear axles are still fairly easy to track down.