Land Rover One Ten project

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Roo

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Hampshire, UK
GTP_Roo
A 1986 One Ten diesel was sat at work with a lunched 2.5 NA engine, and looked like it needed a good home, so I've given it one. I'll chart the progress of the resto/rebuild here. I'm anticipating it taking about a year to 18 months.

I'm currently able to change the oil and just about change a set of brake pads, so this is real in-at-the-deep-end stuff, but I know many people who have done this sort of thing before; advice is never far away. I'm going to put a 200tdi (turbo diesel injection) engine into it from a rusty 1993 Discovery 1: a very common conversion in Land Rover circles, so there's lots of information out there about how to do it; if that wasn't the case I probably wouldn't have taken this on.

The donor: bought off eBay from Scotland for £600 back in December:


DSC_0011 small by GTP_Roo, on Flickr


DSC_0012 small by GTP_Roo, on Flickr


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It had 3 months MOT when I bought it, which ment I could get a feel for the engine before working on it. All seems well.

The recipient: owned by work since 1994:


DSC_0058 small by GTP_Roo, on Flickr


DSC_0059 small by GTP_Roo, on Flickr


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DSC_0075 small 2 by GTP_Roo, on Flickr

I'm going to need to learn how to weld, amongst other things, but that's half the reason for doing this - to learn.

Towed out of the barn a few days ago and loaded onto a trailer to bring home:


DSC_1124 small by GTP_Roo, on Flickr

Now I just need it to stop raining so I can get stuck in.

The logbook arrived in the post today, yay!
 
Looks like a promising project. I love the Defender. Keep us updated! 👍
 
Im looking at a defender 110 for my first car so will be keeping an eye on this thread, just ordered the Haynes Manuals from Amazon. Good luck.
 
Looking forward to hearing more on this, glad to see you're getting stuck into an old Landie. Will make for quite a nice vehicle once it's all done, and kudos for keeping another on the road!
 
Over the past months I've been stripping bits off the Discovery. Everything has been disconnected from the engine and meticulously labelled. All the fluids have been drained. The wheelnuts, it turns out, have seized solid, and a wheel brace and a breaker bar both went west in the attempts to get the steel wheels off. In the end I gave up and just cut through the spokes with a disc cutter.

The intention had been to take the engine out of the body, but as the only bits I want are the engine and transfer box, I figured it would be easier to take the body off the chassis.

Looking around on the Internet, I found out there's 10 bolts that hold the body to the chassis - 5 on each chassis rail - with another 4 running through the rear seat belt receivers. Upon inspection, it turned out that of the 10 body-to-chassis mounts, 3 weren't actually attached as the body had rusted away around the mount:


DSC_3118a by GTP_Roo, on Flickr

Every time I undid a piece of trim or poked around with a screwdriver there was either more rust or just a hole where metal used to be - such as the sill below the driver's door:


DSC_3117a by GTP_Roo, on Flickr

I drove this thing around for 3 months :scared: If I'd realised just how bad the rust was I would've condemned it as soon as it got back from Scotland.

The first attempt to get the body and chassis apart did not go well. Using a tractor borrowed from work, I tied the body to the loader - and the rear axle started to lift of the floor. As it turns out the information I'd found regarding body mounts was wrong - there's actually 2 seat belt attachments and 12 body-to-chassis bolts, 5 on the outside and 1 on the inside of each chassis rail. The inside bolts you couldn't see unless you were right underneath them. I can't adequately describe within the bounds of the AUP just how much of a pain getting to one of them was:


DSC_3525a by GTP_Roo, on Flickr

Looks easy. Wasn't. Mr Disc Cutter was employed again.

Attempt #2 was much smoother - from this:


DSC_3521a by GTP_Roo, on Flickr

to this:


DSC_3537a by GTP_Roo, on Flickr


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in about half an hour.

On the One Ten, in the meantime, I've disconnected everything from the engine, drained all the fluids and removed the headlights. I want to get the Disco out of the way before I get too stuck in to it.


DSC_1138a by GTP_Roo, on Flickr
 
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Why didn't you mention this at the LAN? This is great!

Obviously, I'm disappointed you're not putting a honking great Chevy V8 in it, but heyho.
 
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