Darren

I've used a local mobile guy in the past whose company is called Helyar Autos. He isn't keen to do 4wd's but was fine on ordinary cars.

No, I was fitting brackets for spotlights. I just like to take pictures as I go as you never know when ones of the hidden bits will come in useful

I'd definitely say it's a bumoer off job. Attached below is a picture of the bottle in situ on mine, and I can't see how you'd get to it any other way.

Should be pretty easy. Attached is a pic. of the rear door with the card removed, which shows the mechanism held on with three bolts. The door card is removed by undoing a series of screws along the bottom edge and then carefully pulling it free of the friction fastenings. Hope this helps.

Fair enough - didn't know you had V8 experience too Since my last post I'm loving my TD4 a little bit less, to be honest. It's split an air intake hose somewhere and so is wooshing and wheezing like a 70's vacuum cleaner A lack of time and daylight means I'm paying somebody to fix it too, which is a bit galling for something so simple. Still, at least I'll get some natty silicon hoses for my trouble

I love my GS TD4. It was a bit of a leep of faith when I bought it, as I'd always had bigger Land Rovers before, but it's great. The only real downside is a lack proper low down torque like a tdi. If you've come from a 1.8 petrol then I doubt that will be an issue though The only significant problem I've had is failure of the quite expensive fuel pumps, which is not uncommon. It's also a bit of a minefield as they seemed to have changed the specs a few times in the early years of the TD4.

If you're concerned then spray the perimeter of the window with de-icer before opening. Obviously, don't store your de-icer in the boot!

Hi Chris, - I'm not sure about a 'dedicated' winter tyre, but the AT2 is an excellent all rounder. The ones fitted to mine performed superbly in the snow earlier this year, to the extent that the traction control was only ever needed if I deliberately provoked it! If you really want a dedicated set of winter tyres then sets of steel wheels can usually be picked up quite cheaply on eBay. Hope this helps.

Yes, to a certain extent, but it's hellishly complicated. It would appear that manual vehicles lack most of the wiring for the system as well as other components, although auto's may fair slightly better depending on year. It's reported that LR dealers will tell you that it can't be retro-fitted. It's also been suggested that it was never even an option on manual TD4's. There's a long and detailed thread about this on another forum here where the conclusion was that it was pretty much impossible to retro-fit and that it's much easier install an aftermarket system. There's even details of how to use such a system with the LR steering wheel controls.

I must admit I haven't explored behind the blanked off switch, but I do know that the cruise control needs its' own ECU, which would also have to be sourced and fitted.

eBay is your friend. There always seems to be lots of Freelanders on there being broken for spares.

Essentially, yes. Pull the fuse and leave it for half an hour to be sure the capacitor has discharged. It can then be unscrewed from the rear and unplugged. With the airbag removed it looks like this: The yellow wire is the air bag connection and the switches have their own mini harness that run to the green plug in the centre. To remove the wheel, slacken off, but don't completely remove, the large nut and then pull the wheel towards you by waggling it (technical term). When it pops free the loose nut prevents it from smacking you in the mouth. You'll find the wiring already in place in the steering column for both the stereo switches and the cruise control. It you plug them in then the stereo controls should just work, assuming that the stereo is wired for it. The cruise control is much more complicated though and I've been told that it's very difficult to retrofit. I haven't been able to find any detailed information about what exacly would be required, which means that the cruise switches on the leather steering wheel that I fitted to mine just look pretty. Hope this helps.

Hi Matt, I've got 215/75 15 AT2's on mine and they're excellent (they're also fitted to my wifes' DII). Wear rate so far seems very good - about 8k miles on mine so far and around 20k on the DII with neither showing appreciable wear. Noise is acceptable - they're obviously not going to be the same as road bias tyres, but apart from a very distinctive hum at about 30mph, they're very good. Off-road on both vehicles they perform very well. IME there's very little differnce between them and BFG AT's in mud and they were really good in the snow earlier in the year. For years I'd been a big fan of BFG tyres but I'm very pleased with the AT2's and wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. Hope this helps. (Gratuituos pic just to show the tyres off )

Hi there, the side panels were on it when I bought it. They seem to be a fairly uncommon optional extra. I don't know for sure whether they would have been factory or dealer fit, although I suspect the latter.

Yes, they will. I fitted a set of General Grabber AT2's in that size to mine a couple of months ago and there are no issues. They raise the gearing ever so slightly, but not enough to notice in normal driving, and provide small amount of extra ground clearance.

Hello folks, It's been a while since I put my head above the parapet here and I'd forgotten all about this thread until I got a couple of notifications this evening. Anyway, earlier in the year I was using it as inspiration for building a store drawer to fit in my wifes' DII, so I thought it only fair to show the finished (well nearly) results: Our DII is a very nice ES and one of the prime considerations was that anything I added had to be totally reversible. To that end, I removed the two fold away seats and then cut a ply panel to fit between the wheel arches that extended from the rear door threshold trim forwards underneath the rear seats. To this I fixed the main structure of two sides, a central divider and a cross panel. The latter divides the drawer area from the slightly awkward space formed by the rake of the seats and the narrow full width box it forms will eventually have a hinged lid on it. I cut holes in the ply base, partly in a vain attempt to save some weight, but mainly to avoid the seat anchors in the boot floor as they're slightly raised above the carpet level. This next shot shows the whole completed set-up, which included shelves for various camping equipment. This was all built for a trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains in southern Spain back in October. It's virtually all built from 9mm plywood, apart from odd battern and the main structural uprights shown above, which are 18mm softwood. I chose the latter partly for strength and also partly for convenience as they were decently thick enough to fix screws up through the base and down through the top without splitting. One of the drawers, which opens on the excellent heavy duty runners from B&Q. It was cunningly designed to just miss the plastic gubbins that adorns the inside on the rear door, and when the door is shut that same gubbins is a snug fit against the drawer fronts, which does away with the need for complicated catches and stops them from rattling around. I wanted the whole assembly to be secure when travelling off-road but didn't want to drill holes in the vehicle to fix it. Instead, I built a pair of wooden brackets that were bolted in using the now vacant fold away seat mounts and that were in turn fixed down onto the edge of the drawer base. This was designed to stop the whole thing 'bouncing' over rough terrain. The brackets were made in such a way that they also doubled up as carriers for a gas bottle on the drivers side as shown, and a 20 litre water jerry can on the passenger side. These two were secured to the brackets with small ratchet straps. In addition to the shelves in the picture, a three way camping fridge was mounted on top of the drawer unit, secured with ratchet straps to the tie down points that can just be seen on the front and rear edges of the top. It all worked really well, to the extent that we're going to leave the drawer unit itself in place all of the time (we never used the rear seats anyway) although the shelves have now been removed. I do intent to finish it a bit better when I get chance, probably with some auto carpet if I can find something suitable.

Ahh, thank you very much! My Google searches have failed to turn up any other cutters of the tight size.

Yeah, definitely. It'll be a slightly different arrangement this time though as I plan to fit a dog guard first, which will provide a convenient mounting point (the DII dog guard mounting is much more substantial than that for a DI). I've also got an idea that I can use the mounting points for the fold down headrests too, as they will also be removed, but I haven't looked into that in any detail yet.

I recently bought a kit but the instructions call for a 34mm hole saw for where the rail mounts pass through the rear roof and I'm having a hell of a job finding one. 32mm and 36mm seem to be readily available but even my local engineers tool shop can't supply a 34mm one. I could get a cone cutter that's big enough and wing it, but they're awfully expensive for a one-off job like this. So, has anybody else fitted this kit to their DII and, if so, how did you get around this problem?

Thanks Mo. I'm just about to start planning a similar set-up for my wifes' DII for a trip later in the year. The rear seat will stay in place this time (although the rear folding seats will come out) but the longer boot space should make up for it in terms of flexibility.

I've done it in a five door. Shelves built from cheap ply and fixed to existing mounting points so as not to leave any holes when it was all removed again. I did remove the rear seats and built a vertical plywood bulkhead in the same place, which makes packing much easier. In front of the bulkead we had a box for spares (not easy to reach but hopefully not needed), fridge mounted centrally behind front seats (easy to reach whilst driving) and space either side for our clothes bags. First aid kit was strapped on top of spares box. Boxes were Action Packers from B&Q - these are excellent and proved to be completely impervious to Moroccan dust, which managed to get just about everywhere else! The tray in the roof sits on the trim surroundng the apline lights and is braced against the roof with some plastic pipe on threaded rods to stop it moving around and falling down. Great for lightweight stuff like coats, bedding and in our case, Thermorests.

Thanks for the idea. It's an interesting approach but really too complicated for what I want. Excellent - just what I was after. I'll probably compromise on some 800mm long ones though, as the price effectively doubles for the lengths above that Thanks very much

Chaps, I'm planning to build a drawer similar to this for the back of my 110 SW. I've got no problems with building the thing but, ideally, I'd like it to be the full length of the load bay, which is about a metre. Does anybody know where I could get some decently strong drawer runners of that length?

Sorry, I guess I was picking up on your "Is it worth going that far at all?" comment. Your initial post also didn't give any indication of your level of experience so you'll have to excuse me if my comments had a bit of a Grandmother/egg sucking tinge to them. In the context of convincing your girlfriend to go on your London to Cape Town jaunt though, I'd definitely say it's still worthwhile. If she's never done it before then it'll be a good taste of what living out of a vehicle is like and the culture change between Europe and North Africa will be a useful experience. If you are considering going via the Portsmouth-Bilbao ferry then it's worth taking note of when the crossings are. They have a six day turn around which means they dont sail on the same day every week anymore. This can mean that in order to have enough time to reach the sandy bits of Morocco you could end up leaving on a Wednesday or Thursday night and returning on, say, a Friday, which might not fit in with the amount of holiday you have available. I'm going through a similar logisitcal exercise myself, at the moment, for a trip to Spain in October. If you do want to go that way then I can recommend a company called Allsports Logistics, tel. 01873 850025, for ferry bookings.

It could be just an electrical glitch but, as this light is there to warn of a problem with a system that contains an explosive charge, I'd get it checked out properly if it were me.