How much to build a 110/130 300tdi from scratch?

Lets face it, a̶l̶l̶ most of us Discovery owners secretly want a Defender. The only thing stopping me personally is the money. As we all know, Defenders are noticeably more expensive than Discoverys and I can only imagine their ability to hold a minimum value will increase when Land Rover reveal the monstrosity that will be replacing the Defender some time next year.

Desperate for a 110/130 to replace my Discovery, and after being slightly inspired by a time lapse video on youtube of someone building their defender from scratch, it got me thinking.. how much does it actually cost to build a Defender from scratch? By from scratch I mean sourcing new and used parts and refurbishing - not self fabricating.

Considering that you would be able to add all the extras and uprate all the parts without "wasting" the original parts that came with a ready-to-run vehicle, could it be cheaper?

The benefits of building your own are infinite. Extensive inside-out knowledge of your vehicle, an overwhelming sense of pride and achievement, an effectively brand new vehicle, upgrade everything as you build etc etc

What are peoples thoughts on this? or would you be better buying a basic but decent condition 110 and starting from there? bearing in mind EVERYTHING you would have to change to make it the perfect beast or is building from the ground up the way forward?

Would be very interested to hear peoples thoughts.

Enjoy your bank holidays chaps.

It would probably be considerably cheaper and easier to buy something with a decent engine and body, but knackered chassis and rebuild onto a galv chassis.

Rebuild costs would depend in whether you do the paint work etc yourself, but I would budget a £5k plus for a high quality finish and professional respray.

For a top quality job, I'd say upwards of £10k including the donor vehicle, assuming that you do all of the work yourself.

If you really sourced all the parts of a defender and put it together yourself, I would say considerably more than buying a new one.

I don't want to shoot your idea down in flames. But if you really want to build yourself up a project, I'd say look for a suitable donor vehicle and save for a new chassis. Then build up from there.

Failing that, just dive in, buy a defender as you clearly want to, and learn it by fixing it in the same way we pretty much all do on here.

You'll never save money by trying to compete with Landrover themselves, even if you build it out of Britpart parts.

Yeh, it would seem using donors on a galv chassis would make the most sense. I guess I already knew that. When I did some workings last night, I got to a figure of £25k very quickly but that included upgraded parts and essential extras.

To be honest, i'm just dreaming.. we all do it. Just running through the ideas for when I do buy one.

i am sure alot get started and alot get sold off as parts...one major thing to consider is storage of all parts, double the size of the truck and you still need room to work on/restore parts and alot of that time will be winter so needs to be inside. i have done alot of 4x4 rebuilds in the past and at the time i had a 3 car garage which still got cluttered... its great to think of the resto going as planed and "i will blast and powder coat everything" the reality is you need deep pockets to do all the blasting and powder coating so you will naturally cut corners and the build will not come together how you see it in you head. you will use second hand parts that you previously thought "i will replace all that" until it comes to spending that 250 quid, you will see the used parts in the corner of the garage and think "well they are still ok and you wont see them once they are fitted".. i know it all sounds glass half empty and negative but it very often goes this way... you can still do a good job and achieve excellent results on a tight budget..

Get the best chassis you can NEW IS BEST otherwise this will bite you in the arse every year, if you cut corners on this you will never get out of the build what you wanted to achieve. same goes for bulkhead, remember you will be putting the most expensive part on the body, "the paint". last thing you want is rust bubbles 3 months after the build.
sometimes its tempting to paint a chassis yellow or some awfull colour, looks great as the builds coming together in the garage and mates come round and say "that looks great" reality is it looks crap very quickly.

Have a plan and a time scale for each section but dont put pressure on yourself financially or it will turn into a nightmare which you will not enjoy, just do it as you can afford it.. GET GOOD PAINTWORK DONE AND USE NICE STRAIGHT PANELS, do not cut corners otherwise it looks like the same piece of crap you took apart only a different colour.

make sure you have a comprehensive tool kit to rebuild and disassemble.

Its very rewarding building your own truck and can be very enjoyable, i will be building a 90 td5 with galv chassis ground up in the next year or so but have no time frame as yet. the above is just what i have seen and been through. i dont have big money or lots of spare cash as most dont, i just try and do stuff the best i can, you have to cut costs at some points. Obviously none of this applies if your not on a tight budget..

If you buy a donor vehicle then you have a registration for your rebuild, if you build from scratch with new chassis etc you will have more hassle registering it with DVLA once it is finished.

muskie said:

you will see the used parts in the corner of the garage and think "well they are still ok and you wont see them once they are fitted".. i know it all sounds glass half empty and negative but it very often goes this way..

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^ This I can completely relate to. Sorry to say that this is exactly what I did when rebuilding my axles on my D1.. though really there was nothing wrong with the parts.. its just new is new right? and shiney

Great advice. I can easily imagine all of what you are saying very quickly becoming a reality without the right amount of funds in place.

No plans to do anything at the moment anyway. I'm having plenty of fun (and gaining lots of knowledge) slowly rebuilding my Disco and don't have the intention of buying a defender any time soon. I need 4 seats and space for gear as me and a few mates frequently explore the continent; with a Baltic and Scandinavian trip planned for Aug. I'm just looking forward to the day I can build an expedition 130 for adventuring out of Europe

Someone priced this up (think it was in lro) and the figure for all new parts was twice the cost of buying it built new.

Discovery is the thinking mans tratter.

Hippo said:

Discovery is the thinking mans tratter.

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and there was me all these years thinking Disco was the tratter man's donor vehicle