Lightning can strike twice . . .
MANY Land Rover enthusiasts own more than one Land Rover, but few own two identical ones. For a while now I have been looking after a pair of ageing Defender 90s, both seven-seat Station Wagons with the 300Tdi engine, both the same colour and owned by a couple who run a gardening and landscaping business. The vehicles are worked hard, six or even seven days a week, and when something goes wrong with one of them I need to shuffle jobs around to accommodate it. Running a small labour-based business myself I know only too well that if you’re not working, you’re not earning.
About four months ago Barry rang me up to say that his wife’s Defender was giving problems. It had become increasingly reluctant to engage first and reverse gears and he wanted me to price up a replacement gearbox. I wasn’t convinced that the gearbox was at fault here. From his description it sounded as though the clutch was not disengaging fully. Normally on older Land Rovers this is caused by air getting into the clutch hydraulic system. The slave cylinder deteriorates with age and starts leaking fluid, which runs down into the gearbox bellhousing and leaks out from there. This usually goes unnoticed as on most old Defenders the area around the engine / gearbox join is a horrible oily mess anyway.
The reservoir on the clutch master cylinder is small, and it does not take too big a leak for the fluid level to drop until air can be drawn in. It is a good idea to check the fluid level regularly, but few owners do.
Air in the system will make the clutch pedal feel very soft, with a lot of travel before the clutch starts to disengage. When the vehicle turned up at the workshop I found that the pedal action was entirely normal, with plenty of fluid in the reservoir and no sign of leaks. Sometimes the flexible rubber hose at the slave cylinder end can weaken and balloon when the pedal is depressed, but that was not the case here. I was sure that the clutch problem was mechanical rather than hydraulic, but there was only one way to find out, which was to separate the engine and gearbox and inspect the clutch.
With the engine out of the vehicle all became clear. The centre of the clutch friction plate has a number of springs in it to provide a cushioning effect when taking up drive. The plate had started to come apart, a couple of the springs had broken up and a fragment of one of them had wedged itself in between the inner and outer parts of the clutch cover, preventing the clutch from releasing properly. The solution was simple: a new clutch, along with a strengthened clutch fork and a new crankshaft rear oil seal as there was a fair bit of engine oil in the bellhousing.
Two weeks ago Barry rang me again. He was now having trouble engaging gears on his own Defender. He had checked the clutch fluid level and it was fine. I was absolutely snowed under with work and the vehicle was still drivable so I made a booking for the following week in the hope that the vehicle would hold together until then. Two hours later Barry rang back to report that his Land Rover was stranded in a field and would not engage any gears at all.
Once the vehicle had been recovered to the workshop I found that the clutch pedal action felt entirely normal. Déjà vu? Not half. The clutch had failed in exactly the same way as the one on his wife’s Defender, and once again there was oil in the bellhousing. The bill was slightly higher as I now fit Reinz crankshaft rear oil seals which cost six times as much as the Chinese ones but are better made. Both vehicles had Valeo 9 ¼ inch clutches: I have seen a few of these clutches now where the rivets holding the clutch centre together have failed, allowing the cushioning springs to fall out. In all cases the clutches were old and well worn so I wouldn’t regard this as a design weakness as such. I took the engine out of a scrap 130,000 mile Discovery last week and the Valeo clutch on that one was date-stamped February 1995. There wasn’t a lot of wear left on the friction material but I was impressed nonetheless.
I had good intentions for my three-door Discovery 200Tdi. Over the summer I was going to take it off the road, strip it down and sort out all the structural bodywork issues that I knew were lurking under its rather shabby exterior. Somehow I never found the time. I have been running this business for more than 15 years now and I have never been as busy as in the last six months. The day before the MOT ran out I used the Discovery to take a load of engine bits over to Cambridge Rebores in Burwell for machining. The next day I started poking around to see whether I could get away with a few welded patches to keep the old beast going until I could find the time to repair it properly.
This is how most old Discoverys have been treated for years: patch it up, get another year out of it and see what happens then. There comes a point where the structure is so weakened by corrosion that no amount of bodgery will make it safe, and this year my vehicle reached that point. The body structure on an early Discovery is surprisingly weak and insubstantial behind the doors, relying on the boot floor, arches, sills and outer edge floorpan all being in good condition to hold the vehicle together. Once I had removed the plastic sill covers and boot floor mat I could see why the body on my vehicle wobbled like a jelly when I slammed one of the doors shut.
At some point I will replace the complete inner and outer sills, but not this year. The front three-quarters on both sides are still solid, and I did some major reconstruction work on the rear end of the offside sill last year. This year I did the same to the nearside, reattaching the sill to the adjacent body mount, reinstating the missing bits of floor edge and tieing in the whole lot to the forward end of the wheel arch. All repairs were in 2 mm steel and seam-welded, so it is probably stronger now than when it was new.
The next job to tackle was the boot floor. I have seen people replace these with the fuel tank in place, but removing the tank really isn’t very difficult and allows much better access. It turned out that the tank retaining strap on my vehicle was only attached at one end and the tank cradle was quite badly rusted around the front mounting points, so I dealt with those while the tank was out. I bought a boot floor from Bearmach a while ago for another Discovery, a smart-looking 300Tdi which I ended up scrapping as it was far rustier than my initial inspection had suggested. Fitting a boot floor takes a long time, especially when the metal all around it is badly rusted and has to be replaced before it can be dropped in, but the end result is most satisfying.
I got the back end of the vehicle finished late on Saturday afternoon, which left me with just a small hole to patch in the driver’s side footwell. Or so I thought. I lifted the carpets and found they were sopping wet – water had been leaking into this area for quite some time. The floor underneath was an angry orange colour and crusty looking, I poked it with a screwdriver and holes appeared everywhere. The rot ran up quite a long way into the bulkhead, so I removed the offside front wing and found more decay and corruption. Repairing that lot took up the whole of my Sunday. The inner wing had been badly patched, with rectangles of 'biscuit tin' steel crudely tacked over rust holes and smothered in underseal. It now has rectangles of 1.6 mm steel salvaged from Dexion shelving, seam welded and with the rust underneath cut out.
It still doesn’t look very pretty – at some point I will have to replace both inner wings, light boxes and battery tray. For now it is strong enough. Not just strong enough to fool the MOT tester, but strong enough for the structure to do the job it was designed to do. Anyone can get a rotten vehicle through an MOT test with paper-thin steel patches, filler and underseal, but that is missing the whole point of the MOT test. The test is there for your safety and that of other road users. It isn’t a game.
As I write this the Discovery is sitting at the local MOT station waiting its turn in the queue. I’m hoping I haven’t missed any major rot – I have to fetch a non-running Defender on a trailer next week. I see this vehicle as a long-term project: every year I will do a bit more to it, and try to do it properly, until I end up with a totally sound, solid and tidy example of a vehicle that is starting to become decidedly rare. Prices are creeping up... Searching 'Discovery 200Tdi' on ebay turned up four examples priced between £3000 and £6995. That last price looks ambitious at the moment, but the Discovery 1 really was the last of the old school, all mechanical Land Rovers and I think that in a few years time the surviving examples will be much sought after.
I was pleased to find that I’m not alone in wanting to keep an early Discovery on the road in more or less original condition. The Project Jay Preservation Group (pjpg.co.uk) describes itself as “dedicated to the preservation and restoration of the Land Rover Discovery from 1989 to 1993”. Jay was the code name given by Land Rover’s engineers to the original Discovery. Looking at the group’s Facebook page I was encouraged to see people tackling Discovery body rot much, much worse than mine.
WITH the Discovery off the road I only had my little Peugeot 106 to get me to and from work, which was no problem until Ian’s Defender ran out of MOT. Ian is a small farmer out in the Fens. I’ve known him a long time. He has a lovely early Series III (not on the road at the moment) and an ageing but dependable Defender 200Tdi, hand painted and full of bits of straw, wool, bailer twine and dog hair. Once a year I drive out to his farm, leave my car there, pick up his Defender and take it back to the workshop for a service and MOT. In return I get fresh eggs, frozen lamb legs and other goodies. In pure financial terms the arrangement makes no sense for me but this job isn’t just about the money.
The problem I now faced was that if I left my car at his farm I would have no transport. My friend Lee came to the rescue by offering to lend me one of his motley fleet of vehicles, a 2004 Freelander Td4. I don’t work on Freelanders: nothing personal, but they have no mechanical parts in common with the older Land Rovers, and if I had to buy all the special tools and diagnostic equipment required to add first generation Freelanders to the list of vehicles catered for by the Norfolk Garage, I doubt I would see much return on my investment. So I have only ever had a couple of short trips in a Freelander, and I was intrigued by the idea of living with one for a few days.
It was dark and raining heavily when I set off for home in this completely unfamiliar vehicle. Lee’s hippo (it looks a bit like one, especially from the front) is a high-spec three-door SE with leather and lots of toys, but all the major controls are sensibly placed and easy to fathom out. I was immediately impressed: it steered and rode well, the interior warmed up and demisted quickly, and it was a very comfortable and secure feeling place to be on a wet and stormy night. My drive to and from work is about 40 minutes, much of it on unmarked roads only just wide enough for two vehicles to pass. I had the Freelander for four days and liked it very much. It was good as gold and had a quality feel to it that I wasn’t expecting.
Ian’s Defender needed some welded repairs to the rear crossmember and a new lift pump but passed its MOT with no bother once I had sorted out the rot issues and given it a good vacuuming. I handed the Freelander back to Lee and spent the following evening perusing online adverts for similar vehicles. I’m surprised at how well the little beasts hold their value – most family cars of the same era are worth buttons now, but fully-functional Freelanders are hard to find below £1500, at least in this part of the country. Next day I was having a coffee break with my mouse pointer hovering over “Buy it Now” on a ’98 Freelander 50th Anniversary 5 door (rusty sills, no MOT, £695) when Lee came into the office. “Hippo broke down this morning” he growled. I felt horribly guilty: had I broken it? Fortunately not. He had nipped out to the shops first thing, and when he came to drive away the handbrake was locked solid on one side and refused to release even when he belted the caliper with a wheelbrace. He ended up having to take the wheel off and partly dismantle the mechanism to free it off. Perhaps I’ll just hang onto my money for now.