So on my newly acquired D1 (which was well used for trail duty and has many band aid fixes) I had some odd electrical issues, and some which seem to have gone away yesterday when my battery died completely out of nowhere (think it was a bad cell)

The interior lights in the front don't work, but the ones in the back come on with the doors. Could be the bulbs, but I don't know yet. The dash lights sometimes turn off when m the high beams are switched on. Sometimes they don't. The blower motor occasionally cuts out for a moment and turns back on, and a couple times it stayed on when the car was shut off, and the headlights seem to be on and just in a dimmer mode when in the parking light position (previous owner seems to have removed the parking light bulbs, or they are dead)
The radio was occasionally turning itself off and the ecu voltage was reading 15.6 under load, but both of those seem to be cured with the new battery. Any common issues that I should check? The battery terminals are in ratty shape and the lead that presumably goes to the fuse box does seem a bit corroded. Was thinking of starting by making new cables from battery to alt/starter and fuse box as well as some new/extra grounds

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new cables and check all ground connections....

 

There are a bunch of threads on the same issues, they are all very common. Use the "Search" drop down to find them in the D1 section. They're going to be in the early years of this forum as the D1 was highly popular.

Blower motor switch, light stalk and contact block, vehicle grounds, radio......

 

X2 stalk & grounds, just finished going through this.

 

x3 on the cleaning of the grounds, very important with these trucks. Our project truck has TONS of electrical gremlins we are still going through. Every time we find one, we pull everything out we can and clean clean clean it with a brush and electrical cleaner. Seems to fix MANY issues.

 

Thank you for the replies. I've noticed over the past couple days that although the head gaskets were done about 25k miles ago, the car is consuming a bit of coolant. I've tracked it and it's roughly a cup every 200 miles so not good. It also has a horrible leak from the valley pan gasket presumably. I also noted that all the doors besides one have an issue with opening from either the inside or outside handles besides one. I am debating how far to go with this vehicle since the interior is trashed and it has some floor rot. It would likely be cheaper and more sensible to just get another clean one to swap parts onto

 

Practice makes perfect. The door handles use rods that are adjustable, pretty easy to do and floor rot is one of the hallmarks of the make. Unless you live out in the desert west rot is your friend and close companion. There is no such thing as cheaper when your talking about Land Rovers....... they're all needy.

 

The key is to fix the problems faster than the new ones that pop up.

I replaced my alternator and that fixed a lot of issues. My headlights would flicker but I had plenty of voltage and the battery stayed up. cleaning the grounds and connections helps a lot too.

The heater going off at times is most likely the switch in the dash they run a LOT of amps through there and they arc inside a bit wearing out the switch.

 

And I tell everyone who just bought a land rover this: double-check the routing of the serpentine belt. It's one of the few vehicles out there where the 'sensible' routing most people would route the belt (because there's no routing sticker on these vehicles), is actually the WRONG routing path. While the belt will still be snug, it won't be tight enough to keep the alternator from slipping under electrical load.

Therefore, if it is routed improperly, driving around with lights on, heater blower on and anything else electrical on, wears down the battery. When the battery gets low the power to the ECM and relays might not be enough to 'hold' them and all sorts of 'funny' poltergeist-like things start to happen with the dash cluster, gauges, lights, etc. All this because of a simple mis-routing of the alternator belt. I've done this and checked charging at idle on one and it's good. But drive around with accessories on and it drops.

That problem has happened so many times to people who come to this board. So, double-check the belt routing ...and also the pulley groves. If the belt is mis routed for a long time it'll slip enough to make sharp pointed ridges on the pulley grooves and a belt (even if new) won't ride on the pulley properly. There should be a flat are on the top of each pulley rib. New alt pulleys if you needed one aren't that much money.

As far as if you should keep your rig, just depends. These things usually come with tons of deferred maintenance and most new owners spend quite a bit of time undoing damage from previous owners' lack of maintenance. Once all the bugs are worked out you have a really capable and fun rig. I've had great reliable service out of mine but it took a while to get things taken care of. I would be more concerned about the mechanicals than the body. Get yourself a welder and fix the floors. The heads are common, not too hard to fix. If you go newer DII's, then you get into a lot more electrical gremlins and more engine problems. But if you want something that doesn't need a lot of work, get yourself like an 04 Jeep Grand Cherokee Overland or a Hummer H3. I've got an Overland too and they're just great. Reliable, tons of snort, well-engineered, Quadra-drive (look it up) ....but not a Disco either. Never will be.

There's something magical about these Discos. But it doesn't come w/o work. These probably aren't the rigs for someone who needs to pay a mechanic to fix everything. Don't know if that's you, but a person would need a pretty fat wallet and a lot of Land Rover devotion if that were the case.

 

test the issues you can at idle and just ground a cable to engine and chassis to battery.

What are you doing with the landy? If youre just off roading then id say check your electrical issues then degrease and wire bush the under body and put some rustoleum on it and never go where you can get pulled out. If its a daily driver then I'd suggest looking into what you have for the price you paid. You can pick up another disco 1999 or older and keep that one for parts... Have best of both worlds.