Treewolf

Yes, got a remap for mine from Pete Bell at Bell Automotive Systems (BAS). Definitely worth doing, you'll wish you'd done it straight away. Much, much more driveable.

Do you really mean "spare pants"?!

A rest (hopefully)!

A new slant on an old idea! My 1953 Land-Rover has an electric immersion heater in the block (fitted in place of a core plug) that does this. Flick it on 1/2 hour before use and the engine is fully warm on start up. Also the heat generated by the electricity meter whizzing round warms up the house! (I always try to plug it in next door's supply for this reason).

I have a number of these on my Defender, one flood beam on each side of the roofrack and a pair of floods at the rear. I rate them really highly - I have more light behind and beside the vehicle than in front! 2x 1260LM 18W Cree 6 LED Work Flood Light for 4WD Offroad ATV SUV Truck Boat 12V | eBay They are available in either flood or spot beam. Obviously illegal to use on the road (except as worklights in conjunction with a beacon) but offroad or working the vehicle is surrounded by a pool of light bright enough to read the small print in a newspaper. They're tough, metal-bodied, low-current (you can leave them on with the engine stopped) and best of all, they're about £13 each. They may be of Chinese origin but I can get an awful lot of these for the price of a single Rigid Industries equivalent.

I'm a big fan of his books! Anyone know if these are available in the UK? I am having trouble finding these two mentioned anywhere, let alone the UK.

Actually to anyone with the slightest mechanical nouse and any experience of Puma Defenders, it is completely easy to make a 100% confident preliminary diagnosis from the OP. Fact 1 - the photo shows the drain hole at the bottom of the bellhousing. Fact 2 - there's summat leaking out Conclusion 1 - there's free fluid in the bellhousing which shouldn't be there. Conclusion 2 - something is leaking into the bellhousing. Question - What fluid-filled systems have exposure to the bellhousing? Answer - (a) the engine lubrication system via the rear crankshaft oil seal, (b) the gearbox lubrication system via the primary pinion shaft oil seal, and © the clutch operating system via the slave cylinder. It's not been difficult to get this far. It is unlikely to be the gearbox since the Getrag MFT MT82 box doesn't usually leak, certainly not forwards into the clutch. The rear main oil seal is well-known for leaking on the 2.4 TDCi so is a major suspect, the clutch slave cylinder is pretty good if genuine, pretty bad if pattern, but generally clutch actuation problems will occur, and fluid loss generally leads to pretty rapid loss of clutch, which the OP hasn't complained about. So, most likely candidate is the crankshaft rear main oil seal. (Incidentally had it been a TD5 a major suspect would be the fuel pressure regulator, which is well known for leaking into the clutch, but this is a TD5 feature only). So next question for OP, can it be confirmed that it is sump oil leaking out? Answer (see above) yes. Hence leak confirmed as crankshaft seal. Next question - does it matter, and does it warrant an immediate engine-out or gearbox-out repair? This is more subjective, hence my suggestion that if the leak is minor (as described by the OP) and not causing any major problem, leave it until the box next has to come out. So, with respect, I have to say that I think your comment "from a photograph it's hard to make a correct diagnosis" was a little hasty!

Great video and ballsy operator! Thanks for posting. Got to ask, does the dozer have some form of auto protection against spooling all the cable off the winch drum?

Mines been leaking very slightly there for about 3 years. It could be the rear crank seal, the front gearbox seal, or the clutch slave cylinder, depending on what fluid is actually coming out. Mine seems to be sump oil, so rear crank seal. I meant to replace it last time I put a new clutch in last year but in the end didn't have time. Since on a Puma the clutch only lasts about 50k miles (or about 2 years with the mileage I do) before the damper springs are shot, I'll do it next year on the next clutch change. So if I were you I'd live with it until the next time the box comes out for a clutch change and to check/lube/replace the infamous output adaptor shaft splined joint.

I run both my Disco and Defender on BFG MK2 muds and cannot fault them. Great off road, great on road, and have useful tread to about 80k miles. I did have a set of KL71s on the Defender for a while and they were excellent, but I don't really like unidirectional tyres, and the BFGs are generally marginally better in all respects. They are more expensive though, but do last for an incredibly high mileage.

Back in the 1970s when I was a pimply youth I worked for a while at the last filling station with attended service in our area. What has stuck in my mind all this time was the fact that on wet days we had far more customers than we did on dry days - they came to us so we got wet, not them! I can also remember the problems we had when the price of a gallon on petrol first exceeded 50p, because the pumps at the time only allowed a max per gallon of 50p. We had to set it to half the actual price and display a notice saying the displayed price woudl be doubled until the pumps were replaced. I had a Triumph 2000 Mk 1 estate at the time and it cost just under a tenner to fill the tank then.

"Black tie" to me means only one thing - dinner jacket, dress shirt and black bow tie for the men, and an evening dress for the ladies.

My 2007 Puma has just passed the 175,000 mile mark. There are some known weaknesses (eg clutch, gearbox output adaptor shaft splines, rear axle halfshaft/drive flange spline fretting, passive immobiliser, etc) but it is the most comfortable and usable Defender of all time. The torque characteristics of the engine and the spread of ratios in the MT82 main box make it a delight to drive and superb for towing. It is easy to maintain and the electronics are minimal for a car of this era, unlike all the other computerised disasters-waiting-to-happen. Like all Defenders it will work better for you if you are spanner-happy and do your own maintenance and repairs - with a bit of TLC it's a great vehicle. You don't need much in the way of special tools either. Don't believe the doom-mongers who tell you that (a) it's fragile, or (b) it's not a real Defender, or whatever - they all said exactly the same when the TD5 replaced the 300Tdi, when the 300Tdi replace the 200Tdi, and probably all the way back to the Series 2 replacing the original Land-Rover.

Isn't that just a potato bazooka by another name?

Neat! Working out how and where to cut to do that makes my brain hurt!

I had a lot of the BS when I filled two jerrycans with diesel at our local ASDA a few years back. The woman on the till was jabbering on that I couldn't fill that many cans, I was breaking the law, it was illegal, etc etc. I politely pointed out that (a) even if it had been petrol it was legal for transport even if not storage, (b) diesel is not a spirit an is therefore not covered at all by the petroleum spirit regulations she was incorrectly quoting, and © it is legal to anyone to carry up to 1000 litres of diesel in a road vehicle (in cans if so wished) without a transport licence. She wouldn't have any of it ("I don't make the law" etc, well, she didn't even know the law!) , and although I used to buy around £150 of fuel there each week for getting on for ten years before this exchange I haven't been back since. Their loss, not mine.

Jon, I thought you you were a KM2 man, didn't know you'd gone over to KO2s?

I ran on Kuhmo KL71s for 50k miles and they are very good tyres, don't last as long as BFG KM2s though. The other thing I wasn't keen on is that they are unidirectional, whereas the KM2s are not. I've heard good things about the new BFG AT KO2s but the range of sizes is more limited at the moment, and there seems to be no intention to make them in 255/85 x 16, which is a great size for the Defender. I need new boots for the 110 at the moment and will probably go for KM2s again, the current set has done just over 100k miles and is down to 10mm tread.

Apparently when I was born it was Elvis Presley with "Wooden Heart", a song I hadn't even heard of! I'm not an Elvis fan either, and I am really showing my age with this one!

Pigs, or wild boar. The natural solution.

It doesn't really count since it is a photo I found online, and arguably it isn't actually overloaded, however I thought it was worth posting.

Towbars : Front Push Towbars : Towing Brackets : Watling Engineers UK Ford Front Push-Towbars - Western Towing Both the above list them (Google is your friend). Watling will do receiver type hitches if you want to remove the coupling whe not in use. I have a receiver hitch on the front of the Defender and it is incredibly useful for precision shunting of my big IW trailer, I wouldn't want to be without one now.

Probably the same problem with the variable displacement oil pump that affects the 2.2 TDCi Puma Defender.

No, since the trailer was by then halfway across the front lawn of a large and occupied house, and at the end of a long furrow through a flowerbed and across the lawn, the scumbags wisely kept going. I got my trailer back undamaged, and the unfortunate householder was left to repair their own garden. My biggest problem was convincing plod that it wasn't me. Since the trailer had my Landrover's numberplate on the back this had been reported as the number of the transit a witness had seen. It was very difficult to make the female plodette who came for a statement understand what had happened, and I think it was only because I could prove that I and the LR were miles away at the time that she finally twigged that a green LR and a white transit are difficult to confuse.

Don't count on it! I had a plant trailer with a 2" ring coupling on it which took the fancy of the light-fingered scum. So they cut the locks off, dropped the ring over the towball of their transit, and drove away. I got a call shortly afterwards from plod asking me why my trailer had ploughed a furrow across the front lawn of an expensive property near Maidenhead. I had to prove I was 20miles away at the time before they believed it wasn't me. They had travelled less than half a mile before the trailer unhitched itself, and it still seems incredibly lucky it harmlessly ran into a garden and didn't kill people. The thieves were heading for the A4 when it came off, it doesn't bear thinking about if it had happened at 50mph on the A4.