First time for everything
THE Norfolk Garage advertises itself as a ‘classic Land Rover specialist’, and a while ago I took a decision only to work on vehicles built up to around 1998 (the last home-market 300Tdi Defenders). This is not because I am prejudiced against Td5s or Pumas: I have driven quite a few Td5s and think it a lovely, characterful, fine-sounding engine which suits the Defender very well. The problem I have always had is that the Td5 was a clean-sheet design with almost nothing in common with the earlier engines, and would require a significant investment in special tools including diagnostic equipment. My workshop is always full to overflowing with pre-1998 vehicles so there has never been any great incentive to get tooled up for the newer models.
The oldest Defender Td5s are now approaching their 21st birthday, and I’m starting to feel a bit embarrassed when someone rings me asking if I can service a Land Rover that was registered shortly after Tony Blair became Prime Minister and I reply “sorry, no can do, I only work on old vehicles”. So I am slowly easing myself into the world of Td5s, starting with a very smart and much-loved 90 which came in making some nasty noises from underneath.
The vehicle in question has done a fair mileage, much of it with a heavy trailer on the back, and the strain was starting to show. The clutch was banging and juddering when manoeuvring at low speeds, which pointed to a problem with the dual mass flywheel, and something was clearly amiss with the gearbox, with a low rumbling sound from the back of the main casing. This is a known issue on hardworked R380s: the rear mainshaft and layshaft bearings are only just up to the job. In theory, changing the gearbox on a Td5 Defender is no different to doing the same job on a 300Tdi: I couldn’t see any part of the job that would require tools that I didn’t already possess.
There was one more good reason to take on this particular repair. If you run a garage for long enough you always seem to end up with a small number of random parts on the shelves. You didn’t order them and have no idea where they came from, but there they are. For several years now I have been carrying a brand-new Valeo clutch kit for a Td5. It was probably delivered in error and I never got round to sending it back for credit. That was the clincher – I agreed to take the job on, ordered a new gearbox (with uprated rear bearings) from Ashcroft Transmissions, a new Valeo dual mass flywheel from my good friends at Mansfield 4x4 and with the Boy’s help, set about the job of dropping out the old transmission.
One hour in and I was starting to regret taking on a Td5. I have the distinct impression that something changed in Land Rover’s design philosophy around the time the Td5 was introduced, with a move away from making the vehicles easy to work on, in favour of making them cheaper and easier to assemble on the production line. I seemed to spend far more time on this vehicle struggling with inaccessible fasteners, and removing components to gain access to other components, than I would have done on a 300Tdi. It wasn’t a huge amount of extra work, just enough to be irritating. I wasn’t impressed to find the gearbox mounts welded to the chassis rails and following my usual approach of splitting the gearbox and transfer box while still in the vehicle, I had to unbolt the offside
mount from the transfer box and leave it attached to the chassis, as there wasn’t enough clearance above the transmission to be able to remove it altogether.
I realised quite early on that the exhaust centre and rear sections would have to come off, and I didn’t much like the look of the flanged connection between the two. The nuts had corroded to round blobs, and they screwed onto splined studs pressed into the flange on the centre box. The centre box itself was the original Land Rover item with a late 1998 date stamp. I have seen this kind of thing before. I don’t know what Land Rover made their exhausts from, but they seem astonishingly long-lived. My previous Discovery was still on its original (1996) centre box when I bought it. Replacement exhausts in contrast tend to corrode very quickly indeed – the rear section on this vehicle had been renewed only two years previously, but had already rotted through adjacent to the flange, and much of the pipework was rusted so thin that you could almost see through it.
Random parts to the rescue! About five years ago I ordered a rear exhaust section for a Defender 300Tdi and was sent a Td5 exhaust in error. Rather than send it back I welded a short stub pipe to it and used it as a silencer for a testing bench for some 200Tdi engines I had bought as a job lot. Since then it had sat around doing nothing.
I chopped off the stub pipe, cleaned it up and after some fettling and fiddling managed to get it to bolt up to the centre box. Those splined studs were the very devil to remove but with a bit of help from the oxyacetylene kit they came out without bending the flange beyond repair and were replaced with good old-fashioned nuts and bolts.
With the transmission out of the way the dual mass flywheel was easy enough to remove. I couldn’t see anything obviously wrong with the old one, but I fitted the new replacement (with new bolts, as recommended by Ralph at Mansfield 4x4 who knows a thing or two about Td5s) and bolted up the clutch. If you have not tackled one of these before, note that the friction plate fits the opposite way round to the older vehicles, with the deeper part of the hub facing towards the flywheel. I was using an old input shaft as an alignment tool which would have made it very obvious if I had got the plate the wrong way round as the end of the shaft would not have engaged with the spigot bush. With some other alignment tools the error would be less obvious until the vehicle was back together and ready for road test.
The Defender went back together with no major problems, apart from finding a half-seized universal joint on the rear propshaft which was easily fixed. The moment of truth was at hand: had I connected everything back up properly? I turned the key, the engine fired immediately and settled down to that smooth, classy-sounding Td5 idle. I have always liked five-cylinder engines and can still remember the old advertising slogan for the Audi 100: “Drives like a six, drinks like a four”, from a now vanished age when car buyers not only knew how many cylinders their car’s engine had, but actually cared.
I engaged first gear (stiff and notchy as always on a freshly-rebuilt gearbox), let the clutch up and the Land Rover moved off smoothly and quietly, without the slightest hint of juddering. A quick road test freed up the gearbox a little, and on returning to the workshop the underside was nice and dry, so it was time for this Defender to be returned to its owner. I’m still not sure that expanding my range of vehicles to include Td5s will make my working week any more enjoyable, but I think I’ll give it a go.