Thread: Freelander Drive Problems

This is one of the updates that Simon Stirley put up onto the Freelanderclub Yahoo e-Group:

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'>The good news or the bad ?

The good news (for me at least) is that I've got the crown wheel and
pinion gears on order and they should be here today, so I'll be back
on the road at the weekend - all being well. The bad news is that at
least 3 of the bearings need replacing, and one shell is pressed into
the casing so I may well have to pay someone to put it all back
together for me [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif[/img]

The other news (you decide if it's good or bad in a minute ..) is
that I now know the cause of the problem. It may be bad because it's
destined to effect *ALL* IRD units. Without getting too complicated
there is one bearing that seems to take the majority of the load from
the prop-shaft, and this wears out first. As it wears it allows the
layshaft (inside the IRD) to slide and un-mesh the crown wheel and
pinion slightly, which as it gets more will allow it to 'jump' and
slowly nibble the teeth off. Eventually this escalates and ends up
with an IRD like mine.

A very simple test for this is to remove the filler plug from the IRD
and shine a light into the hole - you are now looking at the primary
gear on the layshaft. If you turn the right-hand driveshaft by hand
you will see it move the gear slightly, and if you're unlucky it will
move sideways also - mine moved over 10mm !! replacing that bearing
now will cost around ten pounds for the part, I'll be lucky to get
away with 300 - and the cheapest replacement unit was 650 [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif[/img]

I know the manual says the IRD is sealed for life, but if you want
the life to be more than 60-80k miles then I'd suggest changing the
oil at least every 24k miles - it won't take long and only cost about
2 litres of EP90 at most. I will be doing mine a lot more often than
that when it's back together ! not only will this keep the bearings
all nice and clean, but it will show you when wear is occuring - the
oil I drained out of the dead unit was practically silver in colour.[/b][/quote]

In the end, he got an engineering firm to put it all back together for him.

HTH

Mark.

I recieved the replacement IRD and viscous coupling for the Freelander from Triumph & Rover Spares in Adelaide this week. The date on the IRD case is 12/00 so it probably came out of a 01MY Freelander which means I should be clear of the design defects of the 98/99 models.

The IRD looks almost new and is definitely low KM as there is no slack in any of the output shafts and all the cad plating is as new.

I will rebuild the tail shaft with new UJs before iI put it back in - the transmission windup that caused the problems in the first place also caused all the rear diff rubber mountings to be chewed out so I have replacements to go in.

The car has now covered about 800km on the U/S IRD in front wheel drive only - still makes the occasional noise when a damaged bearing catches but overall the car is very nice to drive in front wheel drive - but does defeat the purpose of an AWD vehicle - also the traction control cannot handle the torque of a front wheel drive Turbo diesel in the wet - can make things interesting in corners with too much power - traction control seems to take ages to kick in but it worked fine when the car was AWD.

Soon the freelander will be back to its old happy AWD self then I will be able to start on the transfer input gear of the Discovery to take out it driveline slack.

After the hippo is a goer I will pull apart the old IRD to find out why they are so difficult to rebuild and will take the oxy or angle grinder to the old viscous coupling to find out why overworking makes them fail.

I am good at pulling things apart - just getting them part together is the hard bit!!

Gazz