Had a mostly enjoyable weekend at Levuka 4wd park, right up the point where on one of the tougher tracks while tackling a hill suddenly say plumes of black smoke come from under bonnet and into the cabin via air vent...!
At this point I was still engaged in a climb, engine power felt ok, no accompanying noise, so took the snap decision to complete the climb, only to find that on breaching the crest and trying to brake and take the RH turn I had neither brakes or power steering...!!!!
Fortunately managed to make a safe stop, and popped the bonnet, fearing the worst and imaginging the tangled wreckage I was going to see, found that there was a lot of oil over the front of the engine, fan and belt spockets, and the shredded remains of a serpentine belt, guess that explains the loss of controls, but the oil?
Fortunately I was part of a sizeable group and sparingly using the engine and co-opting a co driver to operate the handbrake after learning how tough it is to drive a car alone with no PS and using the Handbrake to slow down, managed to perform a three point turn.
Next part of the rescue was extracting the stricken Disco from the track, this embarrassingly involved it being strung between two Patrols using snatch straps, fortunately we only had 1 hill to go down and another to go up, then a couple of Km to campsite, the lead patrol wasn't man enough to pull the Disco uphill so had to assist myself under own power, again trying to be as sparing as possible because the engine still had no cooling!
once out of the track it was a simple matter of a tow back to camp, where we assessed the damage, after copious quantities of degreaser we were unable to identify the source of oil leak, strangely there was no evident loss of fluids from any reservoirs, so we concluded that the oil leak wasn't major, just enough to destroy the belt, which raised the next issue.
Now, I've had this Disco for a few months now, but when I bought it, I had a vague memory of there being some kind of belt in one of the rear panniers, quickly dug to the bottom of the now full of junk box and as shear dumb luck would have it, it was a brand new serpentine belt, its also somewhat fortunate that I also bought a fan spanner so we were easily able to fix the failed belt, but that still left the issue with the oil leak.
After a quick drive was able to ascertain that all functionality was returned, and a fresh inspection of the now degreased engine it appeared that there was some oil weeping from an empty bolt hole, one of the bolt holes left over after removing the EGR cooler!, but again with some fortune after removing the cooler I kept the bolts in the boot, so it was easy to plug the holes.
A couple more test drives and we concluded the Landy was sound again, gathered the group together and back on the tracks (with me stopping every 10 minutes to check the oil/belt situation, but all was great and we had another day and half of excellent driving on Levukas tracks.
All in all it could have been a lot worst, but by shear dumb luck we were able to quickly fix what over a holiday weekend could have been a game ending problem, needless to say I will never go anywhere without at least one spare belt in the boot!
