Tanuki

It's relatively easy: the bracketry to put an alternatlor like a Lucas 17ACR on a 2.25 petrol engine is a matter of off-the-shelf LR components. Wiring: again dead easy - you run two thick brown wires from the 2 big spade-tags on the alternator back down to the battery +ve terminal, and take the warning-light wire off the old control-box and connect it to the little spade-tag on the alt. This routes the alternator's output direct to the battery, bypassing the instrument-cluster ammeter which is not rated to handle the sorts of current a good alternator will produce!

B+ is the battery terminal. "COM" is where you pick up pulses from for a revcounter. I suspect the small pin-and-socket is the warning-light terminal. 110A on a single V-belt is pushing it: in the days when I was dealing with rally-cars we used either poly-vee (like the serpentine belts on current cars) or twin V-belts for any alternator over 55A. You need a lot less tension (so your water-pump and any idler bearings last longer!) with twin-vee or poly-vee.

Simple test: First, disconnect the wire from the tank-sender unit and - with it unconnected - see what the gauge then reads when you turn on the ignition. Second, use a piece of wire to connect the tank-sender wire to a good reliable earth and turn on the ignition. See what the gauge reads. One should give you full on the gauge, the other empty. If this is the case then the in-tank sender is faulty and needs replacing. If it's not the case then you have a wiring/gauge/voltage-regulator issue. It could be that the tank-sender unit isn't properly earthed.

The traditional way is to drill a small hole into the seal, screw in a self-tapper, then use this to pull the seal out. You may find it better to put in two self-tappers opposite each other to get more grip. You can also get "seal puller" hooks that you push down between the seal and the crank then hoick the seal out, but I've always found the self-tapper trick to work. To fit the new seal, a short length of plastic waste-pipe makes a good drift - being slightly soft it's less likely to damage the seal.

Before you start building a "bitsa", read up on the IVA/SVA rules ! You need to retain a certain proportion of the original vehicle's components if you want to retain the original identity (and the original registration, and any possible associated Vehicle Excise Duty exemption).

What vehicle??? A friend's Puma 110 had a rattle which turned out to be the bracket on a metal heat-shield on the exhaust middle box had rusted through and the shield had dropped...

Hot-air-gun and wallpaper scraper. Take care not to focus the heat on one spot for too long or you may have the glass shatter. Once you've got the worst of it off, wipe over with Methyl Chloride [Wear gloves! Ensure good ventilation!] to remove the adhesive streaks....

Just hook it up to a big battery and a diesel supply. If you've got a priming lever on the lift-pump, give it a burst of vigorous action (ooer matron!) then go for a start. Don't bother faffing around with trying to get oil-pressure or 'priming the turbo' before letting the engine start: they never bothered with that sort of nonsense on "dry-assembled" engines on the production-line and you shouldn't be bothered when restarting your lump.

VNT/VGT is an interesting approach - as an alternative to using a wastegate. The twin-turbo is equally valid - though I've never been that impressed by various implementations: you can get the same effect with a single big turbo by changing-down a gear or two and using more throttle. If you look at the stock power/torque curves of something like a TD5 Defender it seems to me that the turbo's significantly constraining things by the time you're hitting 3000RPM - which I'd consider should be the point where the fun's just about to start. Power increases with the volume of air/fuel shifted through the engine - which in turn increases with higher RPM. OK, we're unlikely to see Diesels regularly hitting 7500RPM like current-generation production petrol engines (Honda VTEC), but it has to be said, you can't produce power/torque unless you're getting the airflow, and that means you need to get lots of fillings-and-emptyings of the cylinders, so revs!

I've used the "rope trick" in the past for straightening things. Get a length of rope and form it into a loop across the longer diagonal of the not-square chassis. Make sure all the knots are tight then get a length of pipe and put it through the middle of the loop. Then start rotating - to wind the rope up in the same fashion as was used by the Romans in some of their siege-catapults. As you wind it up, the ends of the rope are pulled inwards with spectacular force; and each turn of the 'handle' pulls inwards with a well-controllable 'heave'. Just don't let go of the handle: the tension in the rope (and the chassis-being-straightened) will spin the handle with immense force and if you happen to leave limbs, jawbones or skulls in the path then the results will be 'medically impressive' as a friend would put it.

Why not retro-fit the late-1990s central-locking/immobiliser/remote as used on UK-spec Defenders of the era? You get a separate battery-powered sounder (so if thieving villains disconnect the main battery the alarm still sounds) and - at least on the kit as fitted to County station-wagons - ultrasonic monitoring of the insides of the vehicle too [though this is a pain if you want to leave the car with dogs inside]. That way you can do it using all OEM parts which will at least mean that in future it could be maintained properly. I really don't like non-factory security gear because - as you've discovered - when it plays up there's usually nobody with the knowledge or test-equipment to fix it.

Rather than messing round with these stupid, expensive solutions - if you have a wet/dry 'shop' vacuum-cleaner, buy one of the probe-adapters that let you use the shop-vac to suck the old oil out through the dipstick-tube. Pull out the dipstick, stuff in the probe, switch on the sucker. Go and make yourself a coffee. Ten minutes later - you've drunk the coffee and the sump's sucked-out. What's not to like??

The official 90 County station-wagons have no bulkheaad, and 2 inward-facing fold-down seats (with seatbelts) each side in the back. This seat-arrangement fell foul of some obscure EU law in the mid-2000s so was then discontinued on UK/EU-market vehicles. The exact extent of "County" trim-level varied depending on market: my 2001 one came with central-locking, electric-windows, alarm/immobiliser and "Techno" fabric seats [with headrests for driver/passenger] but - thankfully - no sunroof [they leak..]

Merlin Motorsport at the Castle Combe circuit will make them up to your specified length/end-fittings. https://www.merlinmotorsport.co.uk/s/goodridge/goodridge-600-series-brake-clutch-hose-fittings They pressure-test them after assembly, which is always reassuring.

Beadings - you can usually get these from an industrial supplier if you know the part-number [usually etched on the end-face of the races]. Industrial bearings-suppliers generally sell good-quality stuff at sensible prices. For mailorder. Brit-Car is my current supplier of choice.

Be careful about completely sealing the filter drain thingy. Someone I know did this - after a slow-and-gentle yard-deep river crossing (in a schnorkel-equipped Japanese 4x4) seemingly without issue it was only when he got back on to public roads and gave the engine a bit more throttle that the couple of litres of water that had managed to sneak into the air-filter can suddenly gulped into the engine and hydraulicked a rod through the side of the block.

Always take fire precautions. When welding a floorpan I once inadvertently ignited the tarry sound-deadening pads on the boot loadspace/spare-wheel-well of a Fnord Mk3 Escort. It's kinda worrying to crawl out from under a car after ten minutes with the MIG only to discover the entire car is now filled with acrid grey smoke!

Anyone can do the servicing - provided they follow the book meticulously - without influencing the warranty. You mean you didn't negotiate the first-service as being included *at no extra cost* in the purchase price? Shame on you! When I bought my 90, even though it was a personal import from a Belgian LR dealer, the deal was that the first-service would be included. When the UK dealer I took it to expected me to pay for the service I just gave them the details of the Belgian supplying-dealer and said "These people are paying - it's in the contract". [First service, 10,800 miles - new front discs and pads needed! I 'run-in' my vehicles by working them hard and fast].

Isn't it a built-in function of the main engine ECU?

Do you tow? Not all the "adjustable LED flasher relays" cope sensibly with the additional load of non-LED trailer indicators, or have the required extra terminal to feed the legally-required "Trailer indicators are working" dashboard-lamp.

It's a balancing act... The 200/300TDi lumps have the disadvantage of a cambelt: many of the 'cambelt service' kits are of questionable reliability (cheap bearings, poorly spot-welded belt retention flanges on the tensioner pulleys) - it's worryingly common for cambelt issues to appear a few thousand miles after a belt-service! Some TDi engines have crankcase-breathing issues and can end up self-destructing when they run on their own oil. Some of the TDi lumps have also ruined the crankshafts when the pulley becomes loose (after a cambelt refit?) and it's mashed the keyway on the crank-nose (which also drives the oil-pump). The TD5's equivalent is having a crucial bolt fall out of the oil-pump. . . TD5 oil-change interval is 12,000 miles compared with the 6000-mile for 200/300TDi - the downside to this is that the TD5 needs a more-expensive oil and has 2 filters whereas the 200/300 has 1 filter and runs on treacle so in terms of oil-cost-per-mile they're about the same. TD5 has issues with the copper O-rings on the injectors which can ruin the (expensive) electric fuel-pump. 200/300TDi equivalents are failed lift-pumps and the injector-pump eating itself when the case-hardening fails. Parts availability for 200TDi is getting poor; 300TDi bits are somewhat easier to get but don't expect to be able to walk into a LR dealer and get parts off the shelf for either. This is now becoming an issue for some TD5 parts too! (the crankshaft pulley/vibration-damper for example, is NLA and you're forced to go to Britpart). Personally I prefer the TD5 - it's much freer-revving than the 200/300 which better suits my driving style. I'll put up with the TD5's somewhat-heavier-than-TDi fuel consumption for the sake of the better acceleration and higher cruising-speed I get in exchange.

With the hassle of mandatory type-approval (along with implied public-liability insurance cover) I can totally understand why a roof-rack that's rated to handle a significant weight is expensive! Personally, I detest racks: not only do they cause increased wind-resistance even when unloaded, but any load carried on them raises the CoG of the vehicle which can only be a bad thing [see the Scandi 'Moose Test']. OK, I've used Thule roof-bars for carrying some long-but-light fibreglass antenna-pole sections on the roof of my Defender - but for anything weighing more than 100Kg I'll *only* use a trailer.

I've seen similar issues when the brushes in an alternator are sticky in their carriers: they lose contact with the slip-rings and then there's no energising current fed to the rotor so the alternator stops producing a sensible output.

Sticking caliper, corroded faces to the discs due to insufficient use: pad-material (partially) detached from the metal backing-plate can also give strange results - I've seen this on low-usage vehicles where rust's got in between the pad-material and the metal backing. Water-immersion and spray from de-icing road-salt don't help! How old/what mileage is the vehicle? When were the pads/discs last replaced??

My stock 2001 90TD5 [came from the factory with vented discs at the front, solid at rear] consumes a set of front pads/discs every 20,000 miles or so [i'm generally in a hurry, even when towing the big flatbed]. Rear pads last 40,000 miles. Having looked at the prices for 6-pot Wilwood conversions (involving not-easily-available-in-the-future replacement discs) I now just treat discs/pads as consumables. Am currently running Mintex front discs and "Yellowstuff" front pads. They still get stinky when I'm in a hurry.