Robert Pepper

This month has been a rather typical month for the Discovery – a 4×4 trip or two, the usual mundane school runs, shopping and personal transport duties. We went for a snow run after keeping a close eye on the snow reports, which promised much so we dropped everything and bundled into the orange beast, aiming to get at least 1100m above sea level. In good years, snow is found from 800m upwards and most seasons you can generally run into it from around 1000m. But this year it was slim pickings, as the photographs show.

The D3 does this sort of medium trip very well, as the drive to the snow mountains is around two hours and includes some very twisty and often wet tarmac, then off-road onto dirt tracks that are relatively high speed but still require clearance and traction. So all was good, except one of the D3’s major design faults and that is the park brake. For off-roaders it is the most troublesome part of the car, bar none, and that is because it is prone to clogging with mud or sometimes dust and dirt. Given the Discovery was developed in England, land of the long muddy green lane, it’s a bizarre design and even worse, it’s been carried over into the D4 when it should have been carried over to the rubbish bin. On this particular trip the activator light just lit up over corrugations, not activating the brake, but irritating. Yet another clean is in order. Why, oh why did they make it this way?

Bob Cooke – contributor

I told you you’d have a laugh, because it all went exactly as I expected it would. That’s not to say it went to plan, if you consider the plan to be as laid out in the workshop manual, which describes the removal of the Cherokee’s leaf spring in not many more words than: “Remove the four nuts securing the U-bolts to the axle, remove the two bolts securing the spring to the chassis, and remove the spring.” There is no reference at all to that bane of anyone who chooses to work on old cars – the WCS (Worst Case Scenario.)

Hils Everitt – Editor at Large

Last month I needed to have my Grand’s front brake pads replaced as they were down to 20 per cent. I took the Jeep to my mate’s garage to have it sorted, but when they took the old ones off the mechanic found that my discs were badly corroded and said there was no point in replacing the pads with the discs in that condition.

I braced myself for a huge bill to replace the two discs, but the team said: “No worries, we’ll just skim them and they’ll be fine, and then we’ll fit the new pads.”

Sue Loy

Good to do something for the environment this month – helped by the versatility of the Rav4. Our sister magazine, Coast, was having its annual Beach Clean, this year in Bridport in Dorset, and since I was involved with the organisation of the event, that meant the Rav4 was also drummed into service.

The beach clean is organised by Coast magazine,  in association with the Marine Conservation Society, and involves readers coming down to seriously clean areas of natural beauty. As thanks for their hard work, we supply some great ‘goodie bags’ full of interesting stuff from the publishers and the event sponsor, Joules clothing. There were quite a lot of these bags and they couldn’t just be piled on top of one another, so we needed a large flat surface to transport them.

Robert Pepper

No matter what new car I drive, my 2004 TD5 Defender continues to impress me. It really is a vehicle that epitomises the cliché, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”.  I’ve had it since new, and over eight years it’s performed faultlessly, carrying my family around Australia and me on navigation exercises and recce work around my home state of Victoria. I think what’s most impressive is its off-road ability, as all I’ve done is add a 2inch suspension lift and rear cross-axle locking differential. Land Rover really did get the basic suspension design very much right, and the way it flexes over rough ground is unsurpassed by any vehicle short of a rock crawler. The huge clearances – ramp, approach, departure – and relatively large tyres help too, and while the traction control isn’t market-leading it certainly does give the car an edge over those without.

Nigel Fryatt – editor

For anyone regularly enjoying off-roading, getting scratches on the bodywork goes with the territory. At least with the off-road, greenlane, territory. For those of us that use the 4×4 for a multitude of uses – daily driver, family saloon, and occasional mud-plugger – it’s a little more difficult. While you accept that there might be the odd scratch, you want the vehicle to look good.

Of course, as regular readers will know, scratching the bodywork extensively while it is sitting on your drive is pretty dumb! And as I tried to explain last month, it was all thanks to the hosepipe ban.

Ian Seabrook

The Maverick came to me with an entire eight months of MOT, which made the £500 asking price seem all the more of a bargain. As it happens, it then needed a near-complete brake rebuild and I’d ended up fitting new calipers, discs, pads and rear wheel cylinders. Therefore when the MOT was looming at the end of August, I was quite confident of a pass and headed to Tsalta Motorsport (www.tsaltamotorsport.co.uk) in Aberystwyth with fairly high hopes.

As reported last month, I had concerns about corrosion at the rear of the sills. The Maverick and Nissan Terrano II sibling have a pretty good rust record, but the sills are a definite weak point. I was right to be concerned though, the separate chassis meant that the tester put their weak state on the advisory list. That was academic as I decided it was far better to patch them up now than let the rot spread into the entire sill and floors.

Hils Everitt – Editor at Large

As mentioned last month I was planning to get my Grand’s front brake pads replaced. The MOT in February registered 80 per cent wear, although the rears were a way healthier 40 per cent. Since then the brakes have gradually started to feel a bit lumpy and six months on it was time to bite the bullet and replace them.

I booked the Grand into my mate’s garage, Central Auto Centre in Green Street Green, and didn’t bother to ask what the cost would be as it was something that needed doing and not an issue to think; ‘ooh that much? I’ll put it off for a while’.

Bob Cooke – contributor

Don’t laugh. Not yet, anyway, wait until the next issue. All I’ll say for the moment is that I wasn’t sure whether the Cherokee would survive the coming weeks, so when the sun burst out unexpectedly on the Bank Holiday weekend, I headed straight to the Slindon off-road site near Arundel to give the old Jeep what could well have been its last bit of mud-plugging action. Just for a moment, thinking that I might as well let the Cherokee go out in style, I considered taking on the legendary bomb hole. Fortunately I came to my senses and decided that I didn’t want to wreck the Cherokee quite yet, not least because I still needed to drive it home afterwards.

Nigel Fryatt – editor

The famous quotation goes something along the lines of ‘marry in haste, repent in leisure’, well I have a newer version; ‘wash your truck in haste, repent in leisure’. Repent? I’m sodding furious with myself, and there won’t be much leisure in the repenting.

Personally, I want to blame the hose pipe ban that we had in Surrey, which continued even during the early summer deluge that we experienced. Happily sporting my new Cooper tyres, the Hilux had experienced a great day off-roading at Slindon. Now, since the Coopers do, just, protrude from the wheel arches of the Hilux, the splashing muddy water that I was enjoying was splattered up the smart shiny black paintwork. No problem, and to be honest, many people mentioned the rather impressive pattern it made.