If you regularly read for sale advertisements, you may have seen a listing for a “rare” Land Rover Discovery II featuring a 300TDI diesel engine. It was an advert that seemed to pop up everywhere. As luck would have it we found that same truck sitting in the back lot of Land Rover Las Vegas just last year. As vehicles are prone to do, it had arrived there via bank repossession and an automotive auction.
From across the parking lot the truck looked tough and rugged. With at least five inches of lift, a snorkel, big aggressive mud tires, tinted windows, roof rack, tube bumpers and even a stinger bar on the front it looked like it was all business. However, upon closer inspection with a peek under the hood and a drive around the block, it revealed the horrific truth behind this poor truck. It needed a comprehensive makeover just to be road worthy.
So, now it’s an official project of Expedition Portal in conjunction with our partners at Iron Clad, and it has been like adopting an abused dog from the shelter. It could be your best friend and adventure buddy for years to come, or it could be a dangerous beast leading to multiple trips to the vet. How did the previous owner manage to bungle up such a great truck? Let’s take a walk around it and get a sense of what’s wrong and what could possibly qualify as right.
Tube bumpers front and rear. They are heavy, ugly, painted with bed-liner and they have been literally welded onto the frame. Best is the additional stinger bar on the front bumper; this comes in handy for whacking your elbow every time you walk around the front of the truck. Yes, welding up your own bumper in your garage may be a gratifying achievement but there are so many professionally designed and built aftermarket bumpers available for this truck that anything else is really just a bad idea. This DIY front bumper even eliminated the front crush cans and airbag activation components.
If you’re looking at the bumpers closely you may find yourself placing a hand on, or leaning up against, the front or rear quarter panels. If you do, you’ll notice a somewhat uneasy sensation as the fenders give way. They also provide a nice melodic rattle all around the truck when the diesel is on and rumbling. In an attempt to clear larger tires without rubbing, and to accommodate the tube bumpers, all four fenders were trimmed. They were trimmed so much that several of the original mounting points and stabilizers are now gone. The factory black plastic fender flares were also removed and simply replaced by a nice coating of bed-liner paint. The painted areas replicate the look of the original black flares, but the paint is chipping away badly.
Up on top, the truck is adorned with the absolute heaviest roof rack I have ever tried to lift. Perhaps made from solid bar stock, this one-of-a-kind crowning achievement was custom designed and hand welded using a poorly adjusted stick welder. I can only fearfully imagine adding the weight of cargo on to this rack. Once it was removed, driving the truck felt like it was a sports car.
Lifting the hood and gazing into the engine bay…no, nope, sorry, not ready for the engine bay yet. Good horror films always save the best scary bits for last.
The truck has a decent Old Man Emu suspension. Actually, let me rephrase that. The truck has decent Old Man Emu springs complimented, or rather insulted by, a pairing with Pro-Comp shocks and 4-inch tall lift blocks. But, like any fancy lady all dressed up and ready to hit the dance floor, you can’t wear high heals and not pay the price. To get this tall the truck’s stock ABS cables running to each hub had to be disconnected. Not extended mind you––disconnected. So now, we find out that the fancy lady all dressed up in high heals can’t dance, she can only hop around on one foot. Yes, this wonderment of 4×4 engineering has been reduced to a one-wheel-drive mall crawler. With no CDL and no ABS/Traction Control this Discovery got stuck at a 5-inch ledge at the beginning of our test course that was less threatening than a parking curb.
Surprisingly the interior of the truck is in good shape. The black carpet and the black leather interior are all well cared for. Even the black windows enhance the ongoing theme of the truck. There is no way that these windows are legal. The tint is so dark that you have to roll down the windows to use the side-view mirrors.
The interior center console is another tale of woe. In order to turn this once automatic transmission Discovery II into a manual transmission, the top of the center console was hacked up to accommodate the manual shift lever. It was then covered with a spray-painted piece of aluminum diamond plate which was fitted using the measure once cut sixteen times method. Luckily this plate is easily replaced. One day while driving along, the transmission decided to slip out of gear repeatedly. The only way to make it back to the office was to hold the shift lever in the desired gear. Removing the cover plate revealed that the internal rubber shift boots had been cut up and left in place during installation. The rubber strips had made their way down into the linkage and would cause the shift lever to bounce out of gear. After removing the torn up internal rubber boot the truck now features two additional air vents to keep your right hand and forearm warm in the winter, or warm in the summer, using air naturally aspirated from the engine bay.
Ahh yes, I just said engine bay. While, this is certainly not the first DII with a 300TDI, if there is a conventional method for the installation, this one pushed hard on the limits. The truck is ridiculously fast considering what it should be. I’m sure that the cold air intake snorkel, the water-cooled intercooler and the tuned injector pump help this. I say that the engine bay is scary because there is so much going on in there.
The 300tdi is actually the best part of this truck, believe it or not, making this a 2003 DII that get’s 25mpg. That’s twice the fuel economy of my old 2001 DII with its stock gas motor. In fairness to this truck’s creator, I think a lot has happened to it since it was originally put together. Looking through old records I see a lot of equipment that is no longer fitted to the truck but would make a big difference in its performance and overall fit and finish. We’ll be diving into this project in an effort to enhance and amplify the potential of a diesel Discovery. For now, she’s a lot better off than when we got her, but there’s a long way to go before it can be trusted to go very far.
