Please be aware that ECR is now a Defender repair and modification shop only.
We no longer work on Range Rovers, Discos or Series Rovers.
These pages are from work we did in the past and left up for your enjoyment.
1997 Discovery XD
Service and Repairs
This Discovery XD has been sent to us by a customer in FL. He recently purchased the car and sent it to ECR to be converted into a Camel Trophy replica. We thought that would be a really cool project so we took it on and started doing all the prep work to make an exact replica. Sadly, the customer decided not to go through with the conversion into a Camel Trophy rig, so now we are doing a few things that the customer wanted done before he takes delivery. The XD Discovery was originally yellow and powered by a gas 4.0 EFI V8. This XD has been painted green and has had a 300 Tdi engine installed along with other upgrades done by another shop in the area.
One of the items we need to address is some rust in the rear door opening. This image above shows that we have cut out the rusted area and ground everything back to white metal. Next we will fabricate an exact patch and get it welded in place.
Here you can see the repair panel in place. It is all steel and no body filler will be needed prior to paint. The area still needs a little grinding before it is ready for epoxy primer and paint, but the structure of the truck is now back together and... no more rust here. Now the paint crew will jump on this repair and get it smooth and ready for paint.
The 300 Tdi in this Disco is sadly mated to an EFI V8 muffler. The back pressure of this muffler has likely taken many good miles out of the life of the engine itself. The increased back pressure with the V8 muffler pushes the EGTs (Exhaust Gas Temps) through the roof when the Tdi is pushed and in turn brings the engine temps well above normal. The Tdi should never be mated to a set up like this, but these things happen when the shop doing the install doesn't have any diesel experience.
To correct the problem we will be removing the V8 muffler and installing a free flowing pipe with a small pass-through silencer that we fabricated. The silencer is pretty much there for looks in case someone looks under the truck wanting to see a muffler as the Tdi doesn't need a muffler at all, the turbo eats up all the exhaust noise. This will allow the engine to breath and will cure the high EGTs that were related to the old muffler.
Another issue on the Disco XD was a sticky front ARB air locker. We pulled the unit in order to cure the problem and found nothing but muddy water and rust inside the front axle case. The front axle gear oil hasn't been changed in a long time and this truck has been swimming a number of times. Taking a Rover into water is fine, just be sure to do the maintenance after you go off roading. Going in deep water and mud and then leaving the truck to sit yields what you see above... pitted, rusted internal parts. After cleaning up these parts it was clear that there was no saving these parts. They will all need to be replaced. Fresh gear oil periodically is a lot cheaper than locker parts.
We saw that the Tdi install has issues and so does the locker install. Here you can see that the locker was set up incorrectly from the start. The clearances were all wrong and so was the pre-load on the gears and the locker case has been grinding on the diff case. The good news is that we can fix all these issues and make the lockers work 100% and set them up so that they will work long term without issue. The bad news is that because this truck was set up incorrectly before, the customer gets to pay for this work twice, instead of just having it done right the first time.
One last requested service item to finish up on the Disco and it then it will be time to button everything back up, and that is the timing belt. With 131K miles and an unknown history the customer decided to be safe instead of sorry and had us change the 300 Tdi's timing belt. That will give him piece of mind in that area for some time to come.
Here you can see the completed repair on the door striker area. The area has been epoxy primed and painted in the correct color and now looks as good as new.
This image shows the completed XD Disco just coming down off the lift. All the customer's requested work orders are now complete and the truck is ready to head to FL so that the owner can continue his upgrades and repairs. Defender 90, Tdi Disco or Range Rover Sport, it doesn't matter... we handle them all and are your complete Rover source.