I bought my defender in August 2012. I had a yearning for
one for a while, but what clinched the idea was the state of the track leading
to my house in Ireland, directly in front of my gate there is an entrance to a
field and this is regularly traversed by tractors and cattle (not to mention
the odd stray horse). Due to the recent delightful weather this ten foot
stretch up a slight incline became impassable.
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| Ignorance is bliss..... |
I was taught to drive by my father, a retired Naval officer
more used to warships than family saloons. His approach to the rules of the
road resulted in him taking eleven tests before his examiner’s nerve broke and
he passed. I hasten to add that I subsequently received professional
instruction and passed my test in the conventional manner. I was however, left
with a lingering attitude of ‘we will overcome’. It may be of interest to those
who have yet to visit the Irish Republic to know that many motorway
sliproads have signs at the bottom
bearing the legend ‘wrong way, turn back’ for the benefit of those travellers
who find themselves pointing in the wrong direction. I mention this to give
some flavour of the experience of driving in Ireland.
I was assisted in my search for the perfect (within budget
and not irreparably decrepit) Defender by my nearest and dearest. He has a deep
and abiding interest in all things oily, so to be honest, I pretty much left
him to it.
Much of our search was internet based, although he did pull
up a few local prospects. I have little patience with eBay, and by the look of
it, most sellers shared this view. One ad pointed out that the vehicle in
question had been subjected to all that it was possible to subject a Landrover
to, and possibly more. There were pointed references to the fact that a winning
bid was not an invitation to a subsequent bartering process and a general sense
that the vendor was scarred by earlier experiences.
We found ourselves focusing on ‘Preloved’ as it isn’t based
on an auction format. We went to visit a couple of examples that looked
promising on paper. My job, as the smaller member of the team was to get
underneath and report on the general condition. If I emerged covered in rust
flakes and oil then it was time to move swiftly on. I didn’t want to rebuild
from the chassis up, as this would probably be more costly than spending more
at the outset. Over time I developed a feel for an ‘honest’ vehicle, one that
may have been used and abused, but didn’t pretend otherwise as opposed to one
which had been dressed up a bit to look nice, but was actually in danger of
imminent collapse (or explosion).
We finally found a realistic prospect in North Yorkshire. I
had told ‘him indoors’ that he was to be the ultimate judge of the vehicle on
the basis that any errors in judgement would be his to repair. After an hour or
so of poking, prodding and grunting we decided that it would do and terms and
conditions were agreed.
We collected her the following week, he drove and I followed
behind in trepidation. A major issue with anything we had looked at was it’s
ability to do a couple of hundred miles without involving the emergency
services. Most had failed at the first hurdle. Apart from an alarmingly wobbly
wheel and an absence of oil light, and an idiosyncratic fuel gauge everything
went smoothly and we got her home.
Neither of us was naïve enough to think that there would be
no work or expense required. However the initial assessment turned out to be a
little conservative (has anyone heard this before???). We did a general service
in the hope of making it reasonably road legal, with new brakes, timing belt
and every other consumable you can think of. Over the course of a couple of
road trials it appeared that the oil pressure was not what it should have been.
Having replaced the bulb in the
oil pressure warning light (a bit of an old trick we should have spotted), although
the engine sounded ok, there was no oil pressure at idle. After a little
research the rear cam bearing looked like a likely culprit. Removing the engine
side cover plate proved this to be the case. Engine out! Having taken the engine
out it seemed expedient to replace the clutch while we were at it, if you are going
to dangle an engine, I’m told you might as well go all the way. The rear cam
bearing was duly replaced in it’s correct position, with generous quantities of
high grade Loctite to ensure it remained there this time. My beloved fitted an
oil pressure gauge to monitor the efficacy of our work. Mechanical fuel pump issues
were resolved by fitting an electric pump, which I later had reason to be
thankful for….
So after far
too many hours in the freezing cold, grovelling underneath (and everywhere
else) she was ready to go.
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| sooooo cold! |
Timing being everything, I left for Ireland in my van before
she was quite ready. This left ‘him indoors’ to finish off and try her out. I’m
told she behaved beautifully and with the pre Christmas weather she was the
vehicle of choice.
This meant that she was parked on his front drive. Every
time I slid sideways over greasy mud through my front gate, I wished fervently
that we had finished the work in time for me to drive her over to Ireland . I
wished this even more fervently when I received a text from him indoors late
one night, informing me that she had been stolen from the front drive. Luckily
I had made a point of leaving all the documentation with him. I did try to
call, but my mobile reception, halfway up a mountain on a bleak and windy night
meant that I was teetering precariously on the laundry basket yelling ‘What???
I can’t hear you! You’re breaking up!’. It only sank in the following morning, the vehicle we had painstakingly stripped
down and reassembled, complete with new clutch and timing belt and God knows
what else was gone…
Over the course of that day I got snippets of information
from back home. It transpired that
the criminal mastermind who pinched it had been thoughtful enough to drop his
(provisional) driving license at the scene. She was recovered the same
evening, not far from home. One
thing which probably saved her was the fact that the boy wonder hotwired her,
having reefed out the dash, but he was unaware of the new electric fuel pump
under the driver’s seat. Without this the fuel supply was somewhat hit and
miss, particularly on the uphill (and there’s a lot of that in Yorkshire). He
must have thought he’d nicked a right lemon, and promptly abandoned it.
She was eventually recovered from the holding yard, at no
small cost. This was down to a breakdown in communication between the police,
the yard and us. The police told us we would be informed when she was released,
and that we would only be charged from that point onwards (apart from the
standard £150 recovery charge already levied by the police…. The yard would
have charged £50!). The police failed to tell the yard that they were holding
the vehicle for forensics, so when Him Indoors turned up to collect her, it
turned out that he could have collected her the day she was recovered, so that
will be £230 please….
On top of this, the steering lock had been wrenched beyond
repair and had to be replaced, and the passenger door lock was destroyed. All
this just before Christmas, with an MOT due in January.
We plodded on manfully, and replaced the seatbox and
seatbelts (and put new mounts in) while we were at it. She was finished the
night before the MOT was booked. I don’t think I’ve ever been so nervous about
an MOT before, not least because the tax was due for renewal, but without an
MOT I would have to apply for a SORN, which would keep her off the road for a
couple of months while the paperwork bounced about the place.
Anyway…. She passed with no problems. The chap did unearth a
stray spanner under the bonnet and commented that she was leaking a bit of oil
from around the filter, but he seemed quite impressed with her. Now all I had
to do was get used to driving her. Him indoors applied himself to the task of
sorting the oil leak.
The custom built adaptor for the oil pressure gauge and
light turned out to be the source of the problem. It refused to stay where it
was put thanks to the vibrations of Landrover’s ultra smooth diesel. No
definitive solution was reached at this point as every time we thought it was
sorted…. It wasn’t.
Finally the big day came. My heart was in my mouth as I
entered her reg no. in the box on the ferry website. I had just committed to taking her 500 miles each way,
having never gone more than 20 before. I’d also never tried her on a motorway, but unless I wanted to take two days
rather than one to reach West Cork, I was going to have to brace myself and get
on with it. We took her on a trial run on the M62 the day before departure.
Nothing exploded, but she made such a cacophony of interesting and unusual
noises that it was impossible to distinguish the significant ones.
By the time I was due to leave I was practically begging him
indoors to abandon work and come with me as my trusty mechanic. He had already
equipped me with a jack I could barely lift, a tommy bar and an assortment of
vital fluids. He also gave me a tutorial on what to pour where. As an
afterthought he handed me a 19mm spanner and directed me to a nut next to the
oil filter. This, he informed me, would probably require tweaking every few
hundred miles, but I must take care not to strip the threads or I would be
stuffed. Somehow this failed to ease my apprehension.
Eventually I set off alone into the night, well, not quite
alone. I had my dog with me. An experimental excursion with said dog in the
landrover had demonstrated her extreme lack of enthusiasm for it. I was worried
she would have a heart attack before we even reached the ferry, so I took her
to the vet a couple of days beforehand.
The vet gave her Valium, enough to tranquilise a small pony. My dog has Chihuahua
in her ancestry rather than great dane, so she was somewhat stoned, but at
least she wasn’t vomiting.
I quickly realised that I was completely unable to hear the
instructions from the Satnav above the engine noise, but it didn’t matter as
the Satnav was so out of date that it spent most of the journey placing me in
the middle of a field and telling me to ‘turn around where possible’.
We made it without incident to the ferry terminal, and I
dutifully limboed underneath for a little light tweaking. Sure enough there was
an expanding oil stain on the concrete and oil covering the drive shaft and
pretty much everything else. Not having much choice, I persevered.
Our arrival in Dublin was dark and rainy. I was grateful
that we were too early for the daily gridlock. Dublin is an ancient city and so
is it’s transport infrastructure. As we rattled and bounced along the city
centre quays, I was glad I didn’t have low profile tyres. A not unexpected side
effect of the economic crash is that road maintenance is kept to a minimum.
This is manifested in the burgeoning collection of prize winning potholes. I
stopped for fuel some miles out of town, and once again went delving with my
spanner. When I emerged there was a man filling up at the pump next to me. He
nodded sagely, sucked his teeth and said ‘thread seal, that’s what you want’.
This might have been more helpful if it hadn’t been 7am on a rainy February
morning in the middle of nowhere. I suppose I should be thankful he wasn’t just
pointing and laughing.
We trundled on down the near deserted motorway (most of the
traffic is to be found in the cities, there were several occasions when I
couldn’t see another vehicle on either carriageway). Over the course of the
morning I noticed a couple of idiosyncracies. The first being that the speedo
seemed to be wildly optimistic. When it was reading 50mph I was being overtaken
by tractors! (ok, not quite, but the few truckers left me in a wash of greasy
spray). The other, rather more alarming quirk was that once the fuel gauge
dropped below half it began to behave like a metronome. One moment I had half a
tank, the next I was running on empty. My nerve failed pretty quickly at this
point. There are virtually no motorway services in Ireland, so you are obliged
to trundle an indeterminate number of miles down a maze of back roads. The
brown sign that assures you of services as you approach the sliproad never
mentions distance. Neither does it (or anything else) direct you once you leave
the motorway. By now I was so tired I could no longer focus on the numberplate
of the vehicle I was tailgating (a truck), so I thought it a good moment to go
in search of fuel, both for me and my Landy.
We made it to Cork, the dog in a drugged up haze and me with
an assortment of aches best left to the imagination. I stopped at a supermarket
on the ringroad and discovered another interesting feature of my new toy.
Admittedly I had filled the back up with everything including the kitchen sink,
but she’s a van model, which means she’s one big blind spot. Manoeuvring in a
carpark was an exercise in faith and hope (the charity would come from my
victims).
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| Signs and portents.... a view from the carpark (that's not a UFO just left of centre, it's a chip in the windscreen) |
Much
to my own surprise we arrived safely at our destination. Not only that, the old
girl saved the day. My neighbour has cattle in the field below my house. A full
set of cows, calves and a sizeable bull in fact. He’d been using the tractor to
bring fodder to them and the gateway now resembled the aftermath of a re
enactment of the battle of the Somme. The Landrover cruised gently over all the
mess, and all was instantly forgiven (once I had shuffled my kidneys back into
place).
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| Baptism of fire.... This engulfed the road to the village. I was afraid m tyres might melt. |
