John F's Discovery 300 TDi thread

[DS20]

My Range Rover looks no different now to this time last year, before it went in for major surgery (rot removal). I've never known vehicles like these (mk 1 Discoveries and arrange Rovers) for holding savage rot beneath an apparently clean exterior. I think Land Rover had read the Portrait of Dorian Grey (picture in an attic story) and thought 'I know, that's the perfect design for a vehicle'.

[sutty2006]

I too feel your pain. I think rust came as a standard fit on Discos.

 

2 weeks after buying my disco the rear end dropped off and the body hit the heavy duty bumper.

 

Its had more welding than ive had hot dinners. Pointless getting rid now, too much money gone into it!

[John F]

More progress yesterday... the mud flap brackets are attached, the bottom of the floor is undersealed, the fuel tank in in and the electrics have been tested & fettled as necessary.

 

Today's job: build up the gearbox and make a start with refitting the interior.

[brickwall]

Hey John, hoe easy was it to do the archy bits just next to the rear doors? Is it just cut n replace and stitch?

[John F]

brickwall, on 13 Sept 2014 - 10:57 AM, said:

Hey John, hoe easy was it to do the archy bits just next to the rear doors? Is it just cut n replace and stitch?

 

I didn't have to do that bit on mine, the arches themselves were remarkably solid. I think they've been done, and quite well, at some point in the past.

 

You can get repair sections for about £45 each and I can't imagine they'd be massively difficult to weld on, assuming there's enough solid metal nearby to stick them to

 

Update: fuel tank now all connected up, several hours spent fitting the rear seat belts (the star bolts that attach the belts to the chassis through the floor are notorious bastards), new clutch fitted, gearbox built up & ready to go in.

 

Tomorrow's jobs: reinforce the clutch fork by welding a small section of pipe over top of the dome, fit gearbox, fit clutch slave cylinder, remove front passenger carpet to plate the last of the rot holes in the footwell. Then, if all seems well, refit interior and book it in for an MoT

 

 

[RichardMoss]

I have a 2003 D2, with a lovely 4.6L V8 in it, and even here in the middle of a desert there is some rust taking hold around the front sunroof aperture.  Thankfully the boot floor, chassis and everything else are great.  I shall be getting the roof fixed and using it as an opportunity to change the colour from boooooring silver to something more appealing.

[Mr_Bo11ox]

Great work JohnF!!

[brickwall]

Good stuff . I like to see progress.

[John F]

Me too!

 

And I need to get this finished (or at least mobile) 'cos I've been monopolising the ramps recently and one of my mates needs to get his BMW 735 in for a front wheel bearing changing.

[John F]

OK, more progress over the last couple of days.

 

I got the rear seatbelts in eventually, but only after I'd spent several hours dicking about with one of the star-headed chassis mount bolts - these are notorious bastards, as mentioned earlier:

 

 

 

And I plated up the last rot hole in the front passenger footwell, in by the transmission tunnel.

 

 

 

Then it was time to fit the reconditioned gearbox.

 

 

 

A new clutch had already been bolted to the engine.

 

 

 

This time I was taking no chances with the clutch fork pivot punching through the fork - I welded on a reinforcing section...

 

 

 

... cut from a piece of old pipe

 

 

 

The gearbox was supported by axle stands...

 

 

 

... on top of a custom-made gearbox trolley that runs in rails temporarily fitted to the ramps

 

 

 

Fitting a new clutch slave cylinder & bleeding up the clutch should have taken an hour or so, but a defective new aftermarket unit ended up costing us about 6 hours trying to get the air out of the system before the new clutch slave cylinder blew its seal and bent the clutch pushrod. At which point I gave up & went straight to the pub.

 

I fitted a new genuine Land Rover clutch slave cylinder today. Result: clutch was bled within 5 mins .

 

I got enough of the interior in to take it for a test drive a couple of hours ago - all is good, - except for a possible problem with the reconditioned gearbox.

 

The 'crunch' when engaging 2nd gear is still there at higher revs, although it's gone at lower revs. Do synchro rings need to bed in before working properly?

[mat_the_cat]

Sorry if I'm teaching you to suck eggs, but what fluid are you using? Supposedly needs to be MTF94, but whether using anything else would cause a problem I don't know.

[John F]

There's a lot of contention about whether ATF or MTF94 should be used. The boxes were filled with ATF ex works, but a lot of people change this for MTF because it seems logical to put manual transmission fluid in a manual box.

 

This gearbox came back from the reconditioners with "ATF" written on the side in white paint, so I assume it's been filled with that. I don't think this will be causing the problem though, a ATF is only supposed to affect the condition of the box at high mileages.

[mat_the_cat]

The boxes were filled with ATF ex works, but a lot of people change this for MTF because it seems logical to put manual transmission fluid in a manual box.

 

That's interesting, as I thought that MTF94 was originally in them from the factory! No way of knowing if it's true, but what I read was that the LT77 suffered from failure of the plastic pump with MTF, so there was a 'temporary' recommendation to use ATF until a better solution was found, which never was. And people continued to stick with ATF in the R380s, despite the oil pump being upgraded and MTF94 being the official recommendation.

 

If the reconditioners have used ATF, it suggests that it will be OK as if it did cause problems, they'd have likely heard about it by now!

[RichardMoss]

When I ran TR7s the advice for the LT77 was to run it on ATF.  That way they were less likely to crunch into 2nd than with engine oil/gearbox oil inside (MTF94 is very similar to 10W40, by the way, and you can use engine oil as long as you change it every now and then).

[Rusty_Rocket]

I believe ATF was specified so the cold gear changes were acceptable/ possible.. I usually get my LT77/ R380 knowledge from the Ashcroft site-

 

http://www.ashcroft-transmissions.co.uk/frequently-asked-questions.html

 

...which recommend using MTF94 in the R380 and ATF dex2/3 in the LT77.

[John F]

Ta for replies, folks.

 

I'll give it a couple of thousand miles to bed in / warm up / confirm any faults, then. If it's still crunching it can go back to the reconditioners.

[John F]

Right, here are a couple of pics of the freshly-fettled arse end, with interior reinstalled, as the final pics of this rebuild:

 

 

 

 

Good as new

 

The job was rounded off nicely with an MoT pass this afternoon, which was nice.

 

Gearbox is going to have to be referred back to the reconditioners though, as the 2nd gear crunch is still there. Barstarding fucksticks.

 

And as a rather sad postscript to the event, my Calibra (which had been rushed out of semi-retirement as Main Vehicle for the duration of the rebuild) shat one of its HGs on Saturday, largely due to its leaking radiator and the fact that new ones are made of unobtainium ... but luckily I have a 3-litre Omega engine (208-ish bhp) and a six-speed Calibra Turbo gearbox waiting to go in, so watch this space for the next WIP project.

[John F]

Small update on this... a new unobtainium V6 Calibra radiator has now been sourced, so the Omega engine can go in whenever I find the time

 

EDIT: this happened in March 2017, see http://autoshite.com/topic/27570-v6-calibra-de-mothballing-engine-swap-pics-now-added/)

 

But yesterday & today have been spent working on the Disco again. In preparation for its annual trip to the Austrian Alps, Disco needed the usual fluids change plus an o/s/f wheel bearing and a cam belt change.

 

It took SEVEN HOURS to shift the seized, rounded-off top caliper bolt yesterday.

 

It resisted all attempts at chiselling it round, welding bars to it & adding torsion whilst chiselling it and just about every swear word I could think of, and some that I made up specially for the occasion. It finally succumbed to a mate of mine welding some 13 mm hex bar to the bolt head... and it still twisted the bejeesus out of the hex bar. Poor-quality pic below:

 

 

 

By comparison, I got the wheel bearing installed today in just over 2 hours.

 

Cam belt replacement is scheduled for tomorrow.

[Guest Hooli]

That is one impressively stuck calliper bolt!

[Skizzer]

That's my only grump with my 300 series Disco - every single bolt seems to be a fucking war to undo. Otherwise it's a grand old bus.

[Guest Lord Sward]

I had the rear of my TD5 welded up last November.  Apparently it wasn't too bad so no repair sections needed.

[John F]

I genuinely love my dented, oxidising old Disco.

 

In many ways it's the most demanding bitch of a vehicle I've ever owned, and I've owned some total bitches before...e.g. a 1980s Lotus Excel and a 1970s Jag XJ-S V12... But when it works, and doesn't need acres of welding, it's just so, so nice to own & drive.

 

Keeper? Yep.

[Guest Hooli]

I loved my 200Tdi Disco, but when it dug a hole in the bore & needed a new block I got rid. Still kinda miss it though

[John F]

Cam belt done:

 

 

 

[Guest Lord Sward]

Still, at least Land Rover did the decent thing and binned the rubber belt shite for TD5.

[Skizzer]

Excellent effort.

 

That's my only grump with my 300 series Disco - every single bolt seems to be a fucking war to undo. Otherwise it's a grand old bus.

Footnote: Mine blew a brake light bulb today. Replacing this involves removing the (seized) jump seat and then surgically replacing the second knuckle of my index finger with a 2" titanium extension and a universal joint so I can get to the bulb holder.

 

So my point is, big respect for all the work you've done on yours.

[John F]

Yes indeed - access to the rear lightbulbs with the jump seats installed is atrocious. I find the nearside one just about tolerable, being right-handed, but getting to the offside cluster is a massive ball-ache.

[John F]

I mended the borked driver's door window in my Disco 300 TDi last weekend.

 

For the last few weeks I'd wedged a paintbrush in the door to hold the glass up, but it wasn't proving to be a permanent repair. Also, I wanted to actually use the window.

 

The glass had parted company from the scissor mechanism, which had twisted itself to fuck inside the door - note the bent-over ends that fit into the sliding runner: 

 

 

 

The glass is clamped in this channel, which is bolted to the sliding runner. It's rusted to fuck, which is what caused the glass to part company.

 

 

 

I removed the internal rubber strip & attachment brackets from the borked channel...

 

 

 

... and fitted them to a new channel I made out of a bit of scrap steel. It was impossible to get the profile of the channel perfect to grip the window (it was either too loose to grip the window or too tight to allow the window to be slotted in) so I drilled holes in the channel & tacked nuts onto the outside so that small bolts could be used as grub screws:

 

 

 

Then straightened the scissor mechanism...

 

 

 

... andd bunged the whole lot back in the door.

 

The result is a partial success. The grub screws protrude too far to allow the scissor mechanism past the half-way position, so I can only open the window half way. If I'd had more time I'd have come up with a better system for clamping the window, e.g. drill & tap the channel and use actual grub screws rather than bolts, but I've got use of the window again so TBH it's good enough as it is