Fitting bull bars to a Discovery 1

How to fit bull bars Discovery 1

During my off road trip in February I manage to clip a wall and remove the plastic end of the bumper, so I decided to get a bull bar set up to protect the front of the car to give it a little more protection during overland or off road trips.  So I bought a second hand bull bar and spot lamp set from ebay for £51.

Ebay is a great place for getting second hand parts for Discovery 1’s providing that is you don’t buy something 100’s of miles away and end up spending a fortune in fuel to get the parts, fortunately my purchase cost me two gallons of diesel.

I’m not sure the exact type the bull bars are but they wrap around the front headlamps with removable grills (so you can change the headlamps) recovery hoops and a brush guard.  I believe when they were made bull bars like these new were probably £200 with another £80 for the headlamps, so buying second hand I have probably saved about £220.  Considering I know I'm going to rough them up a bit I don't need new ones anyway.


They bull bars came with two Hella 8” headlamps fitted which is a bit of a result and included the relay and wiring loom to fit the lights to the cars electrics.  These should provide much better front lighting on full beam, I'll explain how I fitted them later.

Fitting the bull bars with a steering guard and standard bumper

This in theory like any other job is easy, the ball bars connect to the car by removing the bumper valance, or cutting it, and sliding the ball bars under the car and bolting them onto the bumper bolts at the end of the chassis rails. This should be no more than a 30 minute job.

Discovery 1 Chassis Rails, bull bar fitting

Again like most things I seem to do, I had a couple of issues. Firstly I have a heavy duty steering guard on my Land Rover and this needed to have two of the 4 bolts removed (bumper bolts) and the spacers taken out to slide the steering guard down to allow the bull bars to move into place.

The bull bars should (should being the word here) slide between the steering guard and the bumper and you bolt all four bolts tight, the two top one’s going through the bull bar only and the bottom two through the bull bar and steering guard, bingo you’re done.

I will say now this is where buying second hand parts can be a right pain, although cheap. The steering guard was fine, nice and straight, although being second hand.  However, I found out that the bull bar must have had a bump at some point in the past and would not align properly, the two bracket at the bottom of the bull bars you bolt to were pushed inwards a bit and were off centre meaning the steering guard overlapped the bull bars and would not fit.

So after a few minutes of going hmm I decided the thing to do was to tighten up the top bolts holding on the bull bar which should straighten the brackets out and then use a hammer to whack the bottom part of the bull bar straight at which point I could slide the steering guard back up.

Nearly worked perfectly, bull bar straightened enough to let me get the steering guard in, but then I  have to whack it up with a hammer and push it with a jack into place, this was after an hour and with the use of some wd40 to aid it moving, at which point all was good and ended up with the car looking like this.

Ball Bars fitted to my 300tdi

That's it hopefully they will help protect the front of Larry a little next time even if I come across some wild bush ;-) or if I try to knock over a wall and fail.

Also I'm happy with Larry's new look front end more aggressive and functional.

Nearly done with Larry look.