Alan Downes
New Member
- Posts
- 4
- Location
- Southampton
Hi everyone, I sold my MG and bought my first Landy a couple of months ago: a 1984 110, 2.5 NA diesel. Does this qualify as a reverse midlife crisis?
I'm 53 and I have lusted after a Land Rover ever since I left the army, 13 years ago, and from the second I started my Landy up I knew it was mine. It's a 33 year-old vehicle though, so it came with a few surprises hidden up its sleeve.
I travelled to the furthest part of Wales, from Southampton, with my lovely wife to see it. Just getting there took most of the day, and I was smitten with the Landy as soon as I saw it. After the usual cursory inspection (seeing what I wanted to see, and ignoring the problems), and very impressed indeed at the 9 month old MOT which showed no advisories, we bought it for £2700 and set off home. The journey was a saga in itself...
The steering was really bloody heavy, and just getting it out of a farmyard and then out onto country tracks was a test of strength. I knew it wasn't fitted as standard in this version, and I hadn't thought to ask (or look) so I just presumed that my first job would be fitting power steering. It was a clunky old thing, rattling here and there, banging a bit when taking up drive (it's an old Landy though, it's bound to have some character, I thought), and bloody noisy in the cab.
Was it me, or had the noise in the cab increased somewhat in the past few minutes? Yep, definitely, I'm shouting now and I can barely hear myself. My wife, who was taking our car back and staying with me out to the main roads to make sure I was running okay, pulled over and we had a look underneath only to see the middle exhaust pipe had completely cracked in half, through a poor weld, and so I was now running unsilenced. Ah well, I thought, I'll have to deal with that when I get home. Home, by the way, is 270 miles away.
We drove to a garage to fill up, and got a bit alarmed as the cost nudged £100, but it is a big tank, I thought to myself. Pulling out, being as gentle on the throttle as I could, given that we sounded like a tank as we drove out of town, I settled in for 270 miles of deafening noise. The journey was actually fine, the Landy pulls well and though it tops out at about 60-65 it's a fairly comfortable ride. Looking around the cab as I drive, I see how 'well-used' it all is. Ah well, more jobs to add to the list.
Night falls and I'm not even halfway home. It suddenly strikes me that I have no idea how the dash is laid out, or even if the lights work. Pulling over, I find that I do have headlights, but the reflectors are so brown that the light looks as if it is emerging from a muddy puddle. Still, I'm (sort-of) legal and I can just about see in the dark.
By the way, I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I felt like the King of The Road, sitting up high in my 'proper man's car'. The noise didn't bother me, the rattling didn't bother me, the barely-there lights didn't bother me - getting pulled over by the police, that bothered me but it didn't happen. And the mileage, that at least was a pleasant surprise. 270 miles of mainly fast A roads and motorways and I was showing just under 3/4 of a tank. Even allowing for the gauge to plummet as it gets past halfway, this isn't too bad at all.
Of course, my first weeks of ownership have been a mix of fixing the obvious and making minor cosmetic 'enhancements', such as a knob for the gear change - it didn't come with one. My second pleasant surprise has been that just about everything I have needed to buy has been inexpensive, so restoring it - because that is, of course, what I will end up doing - isn't going to be too painful.
Last week I finally got my friendly local mechanic to give it the expert once-over, confident that he would applaud me on the engineering skills I had so far displayed. Instead, I was told that my Landy is unsafe to drive, one of the rear coil spring seats has completely rotted through, and the top of the spring is wedged into the body above. I have spent a good few hours under my Landy, but always at the other end. Not once did I check out the back end, and it could pop out at any moment...
Not only that, the forward UJ has completely crumbled, hence the banging when you take up the drive. I knew that the doors were a write-off, but apart from that, he tells me, it's okay. Even the steering pump, which I discovered the morning after I bought it. The pump took that 270 miles with no power steering fluid, and no apparent damage.
Actually, it is okay. I have fallen in love with my Landy, and so I happily fork over the £300 to the welder to make it safe to drive, and get through its MOT, until I manage to get it in for a new chassis. The existing chassis, by the way, is the original - I will be very interested to see the state of it when I get it changed. As for the rest of it, the spares are cheap and my mechanic is well-priced, and he will make sure it is roadworthy.
So, what has owning a Land Rover taught me? The first lesson is that an MOT is, in itself, worthless. There is no way you can get that much decay in just one year, so somebody, somewhere isn't doing their job properly.
After that? Look very, very closely and very, very carefully. Take your time and make more of an informed decision. I would still have bought my Landy, knowing what I know now, but I wouldn't have paid as much! I'm in for a few thousand more just to get it back to a decent state.
I wanted a Landy I could work on as a project, and I've certainly got one - god knows what else I'm going to find!
The picture isn't of my Landy, I have been too busy working on it to get around to photographing it, but mine is very similar - my spare is hung on the back door, that's the only difference.
I'm 53 and I have lusted after a Land Rover ever since I left the army, 13 years ago, and from the second I started my Landy up I knew it was mine. It's a 33 year-old vehicle though, so it came with a few surprises hidden up its sleeve.
I travelled to the furthest part of Wales, from Southampton, with my lovely wife to see it. Just getting there took most of the day, and I was smitten with the Landy as soon as I saw it. After the usual cursory inspection (seeing what I wanted to see, and ignoring the problems), and very impressed indeed at the 9 month old MOT which showed no advisories, we bought it for £2700 and set off home. The journey was a saga in itself...
The steering was really bloody heavy, and just getting it out of a farmyard and then out onto country tracks was a test of strength. I knew it wasn't fitted as standard in this version, and I hadn't thought to ask (or look) so I just presumed that my first job would be fitting power steering. It was a clunky old thing, rattling here and there, banging a bit when taking up drive (it's an old Landy though, it's bound to have some character, I thought), and bloody noisy in the cab.
Was it me, or had the noise in the cab increased somewhat in the past few minutes? Yep, definitely, I'm shouting now and I can barely hear myself. My wife, who was taking our car back and staying with me out to the main roads to make sure I was running okay, pulled over and we had a look underneath only to see the middle exhaust pipe had completely cracked in half, through a poor weld, and so I was now running unsilenced. Ah well, I thought, I'll have to deal with that when I get home. Home, by the way, is 270 miles away.
We drove to a garage to fill up, and got a bit alarmed as the cost nudged £100, but it is a big tank, I thought to myself. Pulling out, being as gentle on the throttle as I could, given that we sounded like a tank as we drove out of town, I settled in for 270 miles of deafening noise. The journey was actually fine, the Landy pulls well and though it tops out at about 60-65 it's a fairly comfortable ride. Looking around the cab as I drive, I see how 'well-used' it all is. Ah well, more jobs to add to the list.
Night falls and I'm not even halfway home. It suddenly strikes me that I have no idea how the dash is laid out, or even if the lights work. Pulling over, I find that I do have headlights, but the reflectors are so brown that the light looks as if it is emerging from a muddy puddle. Still, I'm (sort-of) legal and I can just about see in the dark.
By the way, I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I felt like the King of The Road, sitting up high in my 'proper man's car'. The noise didn't bother me, the rattling didn't bother me, the barely-there lights didn't bother me - getting pulled over by the police, that bothered me but it didn't happen. And the mileage, that at least was a pleasant surprise. 270 miles of mainly fast A roads and motorways and I was showing just under 3/4 of a tank. Even allowing for the gauge to plummet as it gets past halfway, this isn't too bad at all.
Of course, my first weeks of ownership have been a mix of fixing the obvious and making minor cosmetic 'enhancements', such as a knob for the gear change - it didn't come with one. My second pleasant surprise has been that just about everything I have needed to buy has been inexpensive, so restoring it - because that is, of course, what I will end up doing - isn't going to be too painful.
Last week I finally got my friendly local mechanic to give it the expert once-over, confident that he would applaud me on the engineering skills I had so far displayed. Instead, I was told that my Landy is unsafe to drive, one of the rear coil spring seats has completely rotted through, and the top of the spring is wedged into the body above. I have spent a good few hours under my Landy, but always at the other end. Not once did I check out the back end, and it could pop out at any moment...
Not only that, the forward UJ has completely crumbled, hence the banging when you take up the drive. I knew that the doors were a write-off, but apart from that, he tells me, it's okay. Even the steering pump, which I discovered the morning after I bought it. The pump took that 270 miles with no power steering fluid, and no apparent damage.
Actually, it is okay. I have fallen in love with my Landy, and so I happily fork over the £300 to the welder to make it safe to drive, and get through its MOT, until I manage to get it in for a new chassis. The existing chassis, by the way, is the original - I will be very interested to see the state of it when I get it changed. As for the rest of it, the spares are cheap and my mechanic is well-priced, and he will make sure it is roadworthy.
So, what has owning a Land Rover taught me? The first lesson is that an MOT is, in itself, worthless. There is no way you can get that much decay in just one year, so somebody, somewhere isn't doing their job properly.
After that? Look very, very closely and very, very carefully. Take your time and make more of an informed decision. I would still have bought my Landy, knowing what I know now, but I wouldn't have paid as much! I'm in for a few thousand more just to get it back to a decent state.
I wanted a Landy I could work on as a project, and I've certainly got one - god knows what else I'm going to find!
The picture isn't of my Landy, I have been too busy working on it to get around to photographing it, but mine is very similar - my spare is hung on the back door, that's the only difference.
