The 1st service

Well, anyway, I come from the school of thought that when you buy a second hand car never trust who you have bought it from.

For example I once bought a Cortina MK2 for £50 with a new battery from a dealer in Stanford no Hope in Essex, which looked good.  A steal at the price and under the nice blue paint it was completely rusty to the point where the suspension failed, as in popped out the top of the strut location under the bonnet.  

Mind you, I did get a year out of it, sold the battery when the car was scrapped and only had it stolen twice from an ASDA car park in Tilbury.  I got it back both times though, I believe it was too shitty for even a thief to keep, oh the 80’s there were such high standards then.  So yes, it was duff, and yes today I think I got a year’s cheap motoring out of it.  However at the time I was upset, I had been ripped off, boy! is it easy to steal a MK2 Cortina or what! not however as easy as a 2CV though, but no one steals them right?  Wrong.

However, when you’re parting with the best bit of four grand for a car had better be OK right.

So, onto Larry’s 1^st service, I found a local 4x4 specialist Gumtree 4x4, within a few miles of my house and promptly booked Larry in for a full service, including replacing the cam belt, always replace a cam belt on any car you buy.  I figured that if I was going to keep this car for probably 4-5 years I best get it thoroughly services by an expert, this way I had a point of reference form where to start home maintenance in future.  I gave the garage instructions to really give the car a good going over and call me if they find anything odd.

Ring-ring, ring-ring.  Yes you know where this is going.  I can’t recall the exact conversation, but I do remember thinking “oh crap this is where I find out Larry is a rust bucket”.  Anyway, the long and the short of it was this;

Larry needed under my instruction a complete 48k service, everything on that list needed to be done.

This is what I expected, full service, all fluids, auto gearbox filter, full check of everything (they missed the air con), cam belt, ancillary belt, brake fluid, coolant, basically the car had an oil change some time back but not a lot else as far as I was aware.  Having said that the previous MOT history had shown limited mileage since the car was in the UK and the previous owner had said he had left is standing some time.

This is what I did not expect, new front disks, pads all round, new brake lines, the old ones were rusty, lift pump pissing diesel everywhere in the engine bay (probably why there is little to no rust there, I did not find the comment "bet your MPG is bad" very funny) various bit of rubber underneath.  

I could not remember the exact list, but when he started on things like, they would like to replace small bushes because I quote “very little play in them”, I thought shit this needs to stop, so I kept to the broken things and full service with all original parts.

Anyway, needless to say I got the work done at about £1.5k including the 20% to the government.  There's a ying and yang story here, we got a TAX refund for the same cost within £20 of the initial service, so yes it hurt, but it felt like a Christmas club where we had saved up for it in advance.

Now there is one last thing I wanted to get done was to check the rust.  When I went there with my girlfriend Rachel, I asked the question “Is Larry rusty?”.  The guy looked at me oddly (probably took some time for Larry to register), then took me to another Discovery 1, in the workshop.  This one was right out of the Flintstones, big holes all over the front floor wells and rust absolutely everywhere.  He said “if this was your car you would have been ripped off, you’re ok, there is a little rust at the front of the rear wheel arches but nothing has gone through.  The Lady who owns this car bought it a year ago for more than you with an MOT which I doubt it’s validity”.   

I wanted to ask if her car was also called Larry, but I know Rachel's eyes would have rolled in her head and they guy probably would have thought I was not being serious.  There can't be two Larry the Land Rover's out there after all, also mine is Japanese so you pronounce it "Wawwy" anyway.

I did not believe at all the comment about Larry and rust, I was paranoid that Larry must be rusty everywhere, but to cut a long story short I took him to two other garages to get him check out and both concurred, he was pretty much rust free, not bad for a 14 year old car.

Anyway, whilst parting with some money with the guys at Gumtree Rachel cunningly negotiated us a free rear wheel cover, which is great, after all its free advertising for them, nice touch considering we parted with £1.5k.  Would I recommend them as a garage, I think so, providing you have a fair bit of cash and you really want everything done on your car.

At that point we drove home, I immediately noticed absolutely no difference what so ever in how the car ran or it's general performance.  However, I did know a point in time where the car had been serviced and what had been done, this was to drive the future service schedule.  So the plan moving forward was for me and my son to do all the routine maintenance and only take it to a garage when something requiring a bigger hammer than I have is needed.

Since then we have serviced Larry ourselves, it’s really easy to service Land Rover Discoveries and I guess defenders.  They have so much room around them changing things like the oil and minor replacement parts on the whole is really easy providing you have some tools, or a son to do it for you.

There will be more about servicing and overland parts here later, but for now that’s the 1^st service out of the way and Larry is now in frequent use.

A footnote my £8.5k for an overland car is not looking good, were about £5.5 into it now, can I get it prepped for £3k more?