Thread: Hi All, have I bought a yellow citris fruit?

Originally Posted by PaulMac

During the week I purchased my first Defender, It came with a long list of goodies such as winch, ARB bull bar, light force spotties, built in compressor and outlet coupling (also came with air hose) built in Engel fridge and inbuilt slide out draws.

Motor wise the car starts and runs extremely well, transfer case is less than 100km old recently replaced water pump timing belt and temperature sender.
Drive train has a fair amount of slop/backlash from what I've read on the forum over the past few days is, that it may be worth my while replacing drive flanges, axles and A frame joint. This seems to be the root cause of most clunks etc. Also has old man emu shocks that have done around 15000km
Now for the lemon part!!!!
As usual for a new car purchase i started nosing around and lifted the floor mats and found that I have a Freddy Flintstone mobile!!
The join from the floor to the fire wall foot well (fire wall side) Is up **** creek.
I'm living remotely atm so I'm thinking of a patch repair and a permanent fix when I get back to civilization. I'll post some pics tomorrow to get some expert advice.

Cheers

Rusty firewalls are a quite common thing in defender/series vehicles that have. I personally think you cannot properly repair a bulkhead in a defender and they are Twin skinned in some places and also have a number of layers folded on top of each other in certain places.

The only way to properly fix the problem is to replace the firewall although it is fairly long and tedious job it really does not require to much mechanical knowledge, if you played with meccano as kid you be sweet.

If there is rust is the firewall there probably will be rust in the door frames and maybe even the chassis, they generally they start to rust in the rear X-member I think.

There are a few threads on here showing how to replace a firewall; I have recently done one myself if you have any question I’m happy to answer.


Ben....

Hi Paul.

I see you signed up

As for the rust

Hi Paul. Are you able to post up some photos so we can see what you are talking about & see how bad it is?

The easiest way is to make the photos an attachment (see the "manage attachments" button when you are making a new post)

If Paul can't I can. But I think Paul is pretty computer savvy

Have some pics to share, I'm thinking the best path forward is to cut the rusted section out. Buy a replacement section from a wrecking yard and weld her up! Also get a good rust inhibitor on it.
Also attached a pic of the new girl.. It is a 1996 300TDI with 160,000 on the clock

How's the door frame Paul?

Did you get behind the kick panel?

Here's a coupe of threads to peruse:

Rotten Footwell - LR4x4 - The Land Rover Forum

Footwell replacement - LR4x4 - The Land Rover Forum

Footwell RH - RHD | Land Rover spare parts and accessories

Hope they are of some use
David

Door frames seem to be OK, a little bit of a brown tinge around the drain holes. Will have to remove some more covers to get a better look at the A pillar, hopefully no rust has got in there.

I'll have a read though those threads, thanks Spud.