90 Dilema

Been offered a C-Reg 90 at work, its been the work horse for many years and is far from in mint condition. I'm looking for some technical advice, and some direction on if i should buy it or not!


Problem No1

For at least 6 years its been used to tow a 4 wheel I-for Williams trailer which has a near 6 metre bed on it, and most of the time the trailer is absolutely brimmed with tree trunks and logs and stumps etc basically its always been way over the standard capacity of the Landy, as such this has happened;



The whole top pf the spring mount has come adrift from the chassis and the shock split in two! Really not good! I have access to a highly competent welder who has some experience with Landys (has a 110 station wagon), but is this feasible to simply repair? can the spring mount be reinforced?


Problem No2

It spends most of its time on a farm running on red diesel, only it turns out that its heating diesel not engine diesel. It smokes it's nuts off almost continually, and i'm told that this is caused by the stodgy diesel, is it? Or am i looking at more engine problems than i care to think of?

Problem No3

Having gone over it today quite closely, the rear slam panel (hmmm, is that the right word, its the black bit below the lights in this picture, is very rusty;


There's a galvanised replacement sat in a shed on site that will come with it, is it easy to replace?


Most of the electrics work (headlights don't but full beam and side lights do and i'm good with electrics) though it has no blastarding radio. As can be seen in the pics the paint work has massively oxidised which is odd as as long as i've know it, its been stored inside! I'm not expecting it to be a runner straight away and i have some amount of storage for the time being, what else should i be looking for problem wise? And given its age, abuse and significant suspension issues, what should i be looking to pay for it?

I would say it's had a hard life & it's shot to ****. If you want a Landy you could do much better.

Unless it's being given away you're taking on a lot of ongoing work to maybe end up with a motor that whatever you do is always going to remain pretty much fecked! Sorry, but I wouldn't touch it, it's been worked to death.

I'll give yer £50 fer the wheels and tyres on it

Adz said:

I'll give yer £50 fer the wheels and tyres on it

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Hear you been playing with the lady today Your wife let you do that

In all honesty i have absolutley no use for a Landy other than the social/weekend exploits requirement (and having had a small taster theres scope for getting one eventually), and i guess i was thinking much the same. I didnt realise just how goosed it really was until giving it a clean today!

Thing is i've seen much worse rebuilt, and i'm not afraid of spanners (which is rather luck owning and nurturing almost exclusively French cars, you need a good tool kit, well small sizes anyway) and having seen a landy with its top off and with chasis out they havent scared me too much yet. The rest of the chasis seems pretty happy but god only knows how much other abuse it's had!

Picking up replacement springs and dampers tomorrow for free, and have a 5 tonne trolley jack to pick it up on, so will swap the shocks out if only for my own piece of mind!

Scarily it has done only 50 miles on the farm under 15mph since its last MOT!

Adz, it would cost more than that to collect from up here there are series rims and tyres kicking about though!

Depends where 'up here' is matey I'm driving to Cumbria tomorrow

greenjeepster said:

Hear you been playing with the lady today Your wife let you do that

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Was that question or statement?

My god your well travelled! I'm in Liverpool, but out on the family run tomorrow.

Theres also a series defender at work which was basically taken out to a field and shot, left for god knows how long to rot and die, not many useful spares if any but makes for stunning pictures, will get them posted in the morning!

Adz said:

Was that question or statement?

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First the statement, then the question. Next time I will make sure I put the proper marks in so you don't get confused!

Without the 'proper marks' in it I can't neccesarily respond so you'll understand old boy, that's why the marks were invented.

If both were statements I might have responded "How the hell do you know?"

Now I know that the second part was asked, rather than stated, I can answer you properly.

Of course she does, she met HG the same day I did, I've nothing to hide from anyone mate

I'm just jealouse I couldn't go along!

As Marcus said it sounds shot to **** and you could do better, but if the price is right and your not afraid of getting your hands mucky then it sounds spot on but it'll cost you a bob or two, though nothing like as much as any other "classic" car and you'll enjoy almost every minute.

Vanny said:

Problem No3

Having gone over it today quite closely, the rear slam panel (hmmm, is that the right word, its the black bit below the lights in this picture, is very rusty;

There's a galvanised replacement sat in a shed on site that will come with it, is it easy to replace?

Click to expand...

Thats the rear cross member.

Its integral to the chassis so its abit of work to cut it out and re-weld a new one. But if you've got a mate who's a welder and a new one sat in a shed then its not going to cost you much- apart from hours of sweat and toil that it : )

If yer gonna commit to it, have a really good poke about at the rest of the chassis with a BIG screwdriver. That'd be my first concern. The bulkhead being rotten through would be my second & a desperately tired, gooed up engine in need of rebuild/replacement would be my third. Then I'd start on the dead clutch from the towing, the shot suspension from the same and work on from there!

What kind of figure are you actually looking at to acquire it?

Ere' Greeny, d'you have a lot of Dalmation dog sex or was that just a drunken one off fer yer avatar?

Hey...haven't you ever seen a toy English Setter....they're great lap dogs, just bigger then your typical toys.

i think with the amount of cross posting and thread hijacking round here, i might fit in really well

There's no price tag attached as yet, and i think the likely hood is that i will be setting the price. The boss doesn't know the difference between a house and a transit van so get all car and parts prices from me, as such i don't want to go ripping them off but also don't want or need a money pit! I guess in the end i could fix it back up and flog it and walk away without too much loss.

I'm up for the hard work and graft, the transmission doesn't make the sort of strange whiny noises i might expect if it where shot, and it goes into dif lock pretty easy. So far i've only ever worked on the innards of diesel engines and so that doesn't scare me at all (also cant really see the point of a petrol engine in a landy if its a toy). Dunno, i guess a half reasonable price might be around £500 but i'd rather pay £300 with the expectation of spending £1000 on it in parts and still being able to flog it with 12 month tax for around £1250? How does that sound? Have some where to store it when the site shuts down now as well which is nice!

Your not going to get much better for £300, so it might be worth a punt. And if your confident you can do the work yourself (and have a friendly welder) then you might be able to make a profit.

Maybe try draining the tank of the fuel oil (!) and get some RedeX in there with some quality diesel, might help to see if the smoking problem is just down to the fuel.

Freds on here rarely bare any resemblance to the original question after 3 posts so making it to nearly twenny's good going!

Yeah, fer 300 notes, if the chassis salvagable it might be worth a punt. If the chassis is beyond repair, really, I wouldn't bother.

Toy English setter? All I can see is a spotty dog with it's legs in the air!

Forums suck when they don't allow thread hijacking.

Anyway; her name is Ida and I got her to hunt grouse, but she would rather lay on me and sleep with her legs in the air....see she is not allowed on the couch so she thinks if she is not touching it she is okay.