Discovery 2 c/d-pillar rust

[joe1]

Just been looking at some earlyish D2's - as part of an upgrade from D1s.

One I found was circa 2001/2 where one of the rear door pillars is practically rusted through in an area about 6"x4" - near the top of the wheelarch lip and extending upwards towards the hasp. (Actually LR call this the d-pillar, but surely its a c-pillar, anyways...). The rest of the vehicle body is good, it isn't an offroad hack - with no chassis welding done or required.

This seems sufficiently rare to me that I thought I'd mention it - so rare in fact that nobody does a repair panel for the area because of lack of demand, so the only viable repair is sectioning in new metal from a donor vehicle. However, this car is probably an oddity, and if I continue to look I probably won't find another one with the same problem - unless you guys know different!

[IanS]

D1s used to suffer this but I hadn't heard of it on a D2 before. As you say, there'll be plenty of donor cars around if necessary. However, I'd be having a very close look at the rest of it.......

[dave88sw]

I have to say i've seen very few D2's with much body rust, i'd say from your description it sounds like it's worth buying and repairing. Check the chassis in behind the spring and the rear shock absorber thoroughly, most are beginning to go there.

[Shackleton]

Joes this is a repair to the C pillar on my Vogue I did last month, I made it from 1.2mm sheet, templated in cardboard first and using the remains of the piece I cut out as ref too. I'd never done anything like it before. So I reckon go for it and sort it best you can! ?

Weird that today I saw my first outwardly rusty D2 too. It was going at the bottom of the rear arch inside the door slam. My own had rust in the scuttle under the windscreen, and the rear chassis of course.

[Bowie69]

Could have been accident repaired?

[joe1]

Interesting. I didn't have a closer look at the vehicle I first mentioned above so its difficult to draw conclusions - I took the line that if that one area was bad, and without any evidence of what may have caused an aparently isolated problem (such as poor accident repair), the rest of the bodywork may not have been far behind. In fact even on the vehicle that I did eventually buy, the area of rear wheelarch that acts as sill closing panel was very thin - fine to the eye and casual knock, but rotting away underneath the factory underseal and copious seam sealer that seemed to have been used more as a gap filler. And perhaps unsurprisingly the inside of the sills is also becoming quite crusty - only really detectable from outside the sill once the plastic sill cover is off, when you can look through the drilled holes in the vertical face of the sill (or when you cut the rear wheelarch to do a patch). After repair my sills will get a good dose of old engine oil sprayed in through the orifices - and then left to drain before venturing on road (nobody wants an oil slick on the road). I wouldn't want to generalise because of the huge differences between well-kept Discos and the workhorses but I bet rear wheelarch repair panels appear on the market within 3 years.....