My Land Rover; History and Rebuild

This 1961 series II 2.25 ltr land rover belonged to my father, who bought it second hand in 1964. It had then done 30,000 miles from new. I inherited it some years later at 55,000 miles and used it for getting to and from work, towing caravans, off-roading, etc. It clocked up a further 250,000 miles on the original engine. Never broke down to the extent I couldn't fix it and drive home and the only major replacement needed was a new bearing in the gearbox and lots of replacement bits and pieces concerning the brakes. I decided to do a rebuild when it was 20 years old because everything was worn out (a gallon of engine oil per 1000 miles!) and the chassis over the front springs rusted so much it broke in two!

The first major repair involved stripping the body off and repairing the chassis, I fitted a V8 engine (out of a rover P6), put it all back together and got another good few years of service out of it. When the gearbox started complaining about the power from the V8 I decided to do another rebuild. 

After many more years of use and abuse something had to be done to prevent the Land Rover from ending up as a pile of rusty chassis and worn out mechanical bits. I thought of doing a full restoration job, returning the car to original specification. After all Series IIs were and are quite rare (as opposed to the IIa s). The trouble was that I would have to source or refurbish just about everything and while I was going to that amount of trouble I decided I wanted something with coil spring and to keep a V8 power unit.

Then of course the 3 month rebuild I envisaged had to be put on hold for other work and family reasons. This was over 10 years ago!

But over a period of time I built up a new chassis using 90 repair sections and series III components, Range Rover axles, suspension, gearbox, Rover P6 V8 engine and various bits and pieces of bodywork from the original series II and 90/110 parts. It has taken years of my, up till now, limited spare time. Perhaps now I have the time I will get it finished! Click on photos for bigger version.

A little gentle off-roading in our Discovery.