Third time lucky
Trevor finally finds an exhaust system that’s easy on the ear
WHEN I bought my Defender 90 Td5, back in 2014, it had been fitted with a straightthrough middle exhaust pipe – instead of the large silencer box that was fitted at the factory. This straight-through exhaust made the Defender sound quite sporty; I often had questions about what had been done to the Land Rover to make it sound so well.
On long journeys, the exhaust note did get quite tiresome though – there was a constant background drone at cruising speeds, but on local short trips I quite liked how it sounded. Last year the exhaust system started to blow out – I could tell from the sounds coming from the Defender that it was leaking. Sure enough, when I got the truck up on the ramp, I could immediately see that the union between the middle straight-through pipe and the tailpipe was badly rusted and exhaust gases were escaping at various places. A new middle section and a new tailpipe would need to be fitted.
The need to replace parts of the exhaust system coincided with a period of time when my Defender would be used for longer journeys. It would become my tow car for at least two 850-mile round-trips to England, to collect new Land Rover chassis. Consequently, I decided to fit a new standard middle silencer and tailpipe to the 90, meaning a quieter towing experience on these long journeys. And this was the right decision – the Land Rover was reasonably pleasant to drive for extended periods of time, without that background drone from the old exhaust system.
The Defender 90 is now back to more normal duties, as I have a new tow car. It has again become a runabout and used for local towing jobs, where it excels at reversing a big trailer into tight spots at the workshop and at the storage yard. So perhaps it is time for a sporty exhaust system again. But I wasn’t going to the trouble of changing the exhaust again just to improve the sound – I don’t really have the spare time for that. However, two things came together that prompted me to make some changes.
Firstly, my good friend Dan Dew – the master craftsman at Demand Engineering Ltd – had given me a slightly used stainless steel exhaust system as a thank you for helping him fit a new chassis to his own 90. I had planned to hold this shiny exhaust system in abeyance until I was carrying out some major work on my own Defender.
But then a second thing happened – a customer down in Co Waterford was in urgent need of a tailpipe and middle box for his own Defender 90 Td5, and he wanted to avoid the nasty carriage charges we now experience in Ireland since Brexit. So I duly whipped off the recently fitted exhaust parts for the man from Waterford, and fitted Dan’s very fine stainless steel system in their place.
The tailpipe on my new Demand Engineering exhaust system finishes at a bore of three inches and sounds amazing. It is definitely better than the old droning, straight-through pipe – it sounds both sporty and refined. My trusty 90 no longer makes a noise like a standard Td5 model, that’s for sure.
While the back end of the Defender was in the air on axle stands, I took the opportunity to fit a galvanised adjustable towing bracket. This not only gives me easy height adjustment to suit the requirements of my different trailers, but it also places the tow ball a couple of inches further out from the rear cross-member, adding vital clearance from the pesky spare wheel hanging on my rear door.