Thread: D3 Quick rundown for the uneducated?

Yep I had read that a couple of years ago. For me the risk of a little over 1 in 100 at full failure combined with some other maintenance issues was enough to put me off, but for someone who has one with plenty of miles and an apparently solid build then it's a great vehicle and worth holding into. Especially if you have undertaken a good service regime. For me if the nominal service is say 15,000klms then I do an intermediate oil and filter change at half that distance. Diesels love good fresh oil.

Cheers

As a potential D3 buyer some time in the near future .. if I do buy a 2.7 with the strict plan to do the bearings as a priority .. no matter if they're good or going bad .. would such a plan offer up any surety that the bearings/crank won't fail?
Or is it an inherent property of the design of the block or crank or something?

Land Rover Discovery 3 2.7L 90mm stroke TDV6 billet 4340 crankshaft - Racing connecting rods, Engine components manufactuer in china, Hurricane connecting rod for sale, Race connecting rods,Forged 4340 steel performance rods

Originally Posted by justinc

Land Rover Discovery 3 2.7L 90mm stroke TDV6 billet 4340 crankshaft - Racing connecting rods, Engine components manufactuer in china, Hurricane connecting rod for sale, Race connecting rods,Forged 4340 steel performance rods

I don't know the first thing about crankshafts - is that an upgrade?

Originally Posted by AK83

As a potential D3 buyer some time in the near future .. if I do buy a 2.7 with the strict plan to do the bearings as a priority .. no matter if they're good or going bad .. would such a plan offer up any surety that the bearings/crank won't fail?
Or is it an inherent property of the design of the block or crank or something?

Seems the jury is out on if it was a bad batch of crank shafts, a bad batch of bearing shells, an assembly problem, or wrong spec oil being used during servicing.

Does seem JLR ended up with the bad batch though with some failures reported with the Jags but most with the Disco.

One view is if it hasn’t failed in the first 7-10 years then you may have avoided the bad batch.

Fingers crossed - although if mine went I would probably part the car and upgrade to a D4.

Nah DiscoDB. It’s an engine design flaw of some sort. It has to be. These engines have constantly failed right through to the last of the D4 and even failures in D5 have been reported. No one (aside from LR) knows for sure of the cause and what conspires for it to fail. Servicing isn’t a major factor as factory serviced ones fail as well as highly serviced ones. Low mileage engines fail, high mileage fail. Some have said that maybe the gearbox causes crankshaft resonance of it’s not healthy? Who knows. It’s a lottery and I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to reduce the odds in their favour. Unfortunately you have more chance of the engine dying than winning first division.

Spoke with a guy I know today who had an early RRS with 2.7D motor. Had 400,000+ kms on it with pretty basic maintenance and no preventative care and no great mechanical knowledge or LR brand interest. Told me after noticing a slow coolant leak he did nothing until a catastrophic coolant leak failure led to loss of the engine. No overheat warning.

He told me he was told by mechanic was caused by a failed block core plug letting go.

I’ve not heard this before so I didn’t challenge him on other reasons i.e. plastic coolant parts.

Anyone heard of this as he suggested they can be easily replaced?

Moral of story is always jump on any slow coolant leak.

Car was otherwise fine but with some transmission shudder and he had not in his long ownership (majority of kms) done the timing belts!

Taking into account that the only one I have seen in the flesh had broken obliquely from one journal radius to the counterweight, it may be a machining QC issue . Thinking back to seeing a few V6 Detroit diesels with broken cranks due to the wrong radius machined at the journal, causing a stress raiser, every one had propagated from the same area...